Word: politburo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most important, Gorbachev has staked out the political center, a difficult role for a self-avowed radical with a penchant for controlled chaos. It is, as Soviets say, no accident that Gorbachev permits Boris Yeltsin -- the purged Politburo member turned populist -- to attack him from the left, while hard- liner Yegor Ligachev snipes at him from the right. Still, Gorbachev is careful not to get too far ahead of his comrades. As the Soviet editor Vitali Tretyakov has written, Gorbachev has a "subtle perception of the balance of economic and political variables not only today but ((an appreciation of where...
...under arms in the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees, from the East European states. They include some of the same Hungarians who chanted, "Russians Go Home!"; the same Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into Wenceslas Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking their key chains; and the same East Germans who found a better way to invade the Federal Republic throughout the year...
...Gorbachev's closest advisers, Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, privately told a foreign leader this fall, "Perestroika means a loss of our self-confidence." Then he added, "It also means realizing that our self- confidence was always misplaced." The West ought to realize that much of its fear of the Soviet Union was also misplaced...
Washington, Paris, London and other capitals chose to overlook Ceausescu's steel Stalinist hand at home, where he enforced a shameless cult of his own personality. He tolerated neither dissent among citizens nor a difference of opinion inside the party. He appointed his wife to the Politburo, his sons to high party and government rank and more than 30 other relatives to official positions. He basked in such honorifics as the Genius of the Carpathians and the Danube of Thought while treating the Rumanian people with extraordinary cruelty...