Word: pugo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After two days of isolation, Gorbachev was suddenly again besieged by visitors from Moscow, this time competing for his favor. How many conspirators tried to flee the capital on Wednesday is still not entirely clear. Pugo, for example, was originally rumored to be aboard a plane headed for Central Asia, but in fact was soon admitted to a Moscow hospital with gunshot wounds, apparently self-inflicted, from which he died. Kryuchkov and Yazov, however, did get to Vnukovo Airport ahead of their pursuers from Yeltsin's headquarters, and hopped a plane for Gorbachev's resort. They were accompanied by Anatoli...
...Pugo simultaneously played to Gorbachev's own Russianness by warning that the many ethnic Russians who lived in the Baltics were subject to harassment and perhaps even persecution at the hands of local nationalists. Choosing his words carefully, Pugo asked for, and received, authority to take "the measures necessary to assure that constitutional norms are upheld and the rights of minorities are respected...
Gorbachev met frequently with Boris Pugo, who had become Interior Minister on Dec. 2, 1990. In these conversations Pugo was careful to steer clear of the fundamental issue of whether the Baltic republics were entitled to independence. Instead he stayed within the bounds of his responsibility for law and order. With the Baltics acting as though they were already sovereign states, he said, the situation was "spinning out of control"; if the Baltics succeeded in defying Moscow, other republics would be encouraged to do the same...
...Pugo was a Latvian who had been the KGB chief in Riga in the early '80s. He knew that Gorbachev believed all nationalities in the U.S.S.R. should be united by Soviet patriotism. In his conversations with Gorbachev he evoked this sentiment repeatedly, in effect offering himself as an example of a good Balt as opposed to ungrateful, unreasonable troublemakers like Vytautas Landsbergis, the brave but reckless president of Lithuania...
...episode further damaged him politically. By allowing Pugo and the military to use violence, Gorbachev caused many of the democrats and nationalists to give up on him. Yet by not allowing the hard-liners to finish what they had started on Bloody Sunday in Vilnius, he alienated them as well. He still commanded the middle ground between right and left, but his position was becoming increasingly lonely and precarious...