Word: pugo
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...evidence, Frank points to the composition of the new policymaking Security Council announced recently in Moscow. In addition to the President, its members are Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and Prime Minister Pavlov, both hidebound bureaucrats; Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, a professional diplomat with little political clout; Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, all hard-liners; and two token moderates, former Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin and Yevgeni Primakov, a Gorbachev adviser...
Some of the conspirators, notably Interior Minister Boris Pugo (the apparent suicide), Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, are said to have begun plotting in December 1990. If so, eight months later they still had not organized the most obvious, and essential, opening moves: arresting, or preferably killing, potential opponents (some supporters of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev operated unmolested from a Kremlin office almost next door to Yanayev's); assuring themselves of the loyalty of military units and then moving them into position to crush resistance speedily (army and KGB units flatly refused to storm the White...
What's the hardest way to kill yourself? Three bullets to the head certainly ranks. According to Moscow police sources, that was the actual cause of death for coup conspirator BORIS PUGO, the Soviet Interior Minister who was officially described as having "committed suicide" when the August putsch fizzled. As for two other top Communist officials reported to have killed themselves by leaping from windows, sources say they probably were pushed in order to silence them. They apparently knew too much about the smuggling of Communist wealth out of the country as the party collapsed...
Meanwhile followers of Yeltsin announced that they would hold a rally in central Moscow on March 28. In a meeting at Gorbachev's office, Pugo conjured up the specter of "neo-Bolsheviks storming the Kremlin." The rally was a direct challenge to Gorbachev's personal authority, said Pugo. Gorbachev agreed to prohibit all rallies and to back up the ban with a show of force by bringing troops and tanks into the capital...
Gorbachev too was shaken by how narrowly disaster had been averted. For the second time, he had taken the advice of Pugo, Kryuchkov and the hard-liners -- and for the second time he had seen that their methods would have led only to blood in the streets...