Word: putsch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Since joining the resistance to the putsch attempt in August, Shevardnadze has been watching from the sidelines as the power of the central government has drained away to the ascendant republics. His decision to rejoin Mikhail Gorbachev is likely to lend credibility to the Soviet President's efforts to reconstruct a union and to solicit Western aid for the ailing economy...
...Communists' complex financial affairs could take years to untangle. The main mystery is where the party stashed its fortune, estimated to be as much as $176 billion. Two official inquiries are under way -- one by the Russian parliament, which is probing party involvement in the Aug. 19 putsch, and another by Russia's prosecutor general, Valentin Stepankov. So far, little light has been shed on the whereabouts of the vanished loot. But the source appears indisputable: the Soviet treasury. "The party did not see any difference between its budget and that of the state," says Nikolai Fedorov, justice minister...
...institutions from scratch is a Herculean task, especially for people who have no training in how to make democratic politics work. In Russia the current leaders did not attain power through a well-orchestrated plan but were thrust into a vacuum created by the failure of the reactionary putsch in August. They have been improvising ever since...
...Soviet Union is not fated to replay this capsule history of Germany's Weimar Republic. But the possibility cannot be dismissed either. And this time the drama might not take as long as the nine-plus years that elapsed between the failure of Adolf Hitler's 1923 beer-hall putsch and the founding of the Third Reich...