Word: primed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...televised appeals. Instead there was what Russian politicians euphemistically call technology: a stream of invective on state TV. Most of this was instigated by the Kremlin and aimed at discrediting the one bloc thought to present any risk to Boris Yeltsin: the Fatherland-All Russia coalition, led by former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov...
They found him in 47-year-old Prime Minister Vladimir Putin: his youth, his sportsman's bearing, his precisely phrased and brutally delivered statements--all so different from the doddering Yeltsin and his mangled, half-incomprehensible public utterances. In the past few months, as Russian troops have streamed into Chechnya, Putin's popularity has soared. And though the presidential elections won't take place until next June, the Duma outcome was widely seen as a sign of Putin's strength. A vote for Unity was, in most Russian minds, a vote for Putin. Immediately after last week's results were...
...change in tactics. Grozny would be taken "in a matter of days," declared General Valeri Manilov of the General Staff, and all of Chechnya would fall to Russia in a month or two. A day later, the military denied that any foray into Grozny had even taken place. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, chief sponsor and political beneficiary of the war, dismissed reports of heavy casualties as "complete nonsense...
...though, Moscow is winning the home-propaganda battle. Opinion surveys show that around 60% of Russians support the war as a necessity to quell Chechen militants. The generals are sure their Prime Minister will back them to the end. But while "there is political and military consensus on how to do this right," says Sherman Garnett of Michigan State University, an expert on the Russian military, "whether it works or not is another matter...
...everyone, and there's the rub. Americans, happy in their getting and spending, are largely oblivious to their massive world influence. But others are not, particularly foreign elites. Some chafe, like the French Minister of Culture who called Disneyland Paris a cultural Chernobyl. Some rant, like the Malaysian Prime Minister who rose at the U.N. in September to denounce "the true ugliness of Western capitalism...backed by the military might of capitalism's greatest proponent...