Word: putsch
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...first learned of the putsch at about 5 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 18, when an agitated Gorbachev told her that a group of men had arrived from Moscow to see him and that all the phone lines were dead, including the "red phone" that links the President to the Minister of Defense. The whole family quickly agreed they would stick by the President at all costs. "This was a very serious decision," Raisa told Trud. "We know our history." This may have been a reference to the Bolsheviks' grisly execution of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and his family...
Raisa told Trud, "I never thought such a thing ((as the coup)) could happen to us." But in her autobiography, I Hope (HarperCollins; $20), completed four months before the failed putsch, the Soviet First Lady says she has long been anxious about the "fierce struggle now going on between loyalty and treachery" in the Soviet Union. In the book, actually an extended interview with Soviet writer Georgi Pryakhin, Raisa discloses for the first time that her grandfather was executed under Stalin, an experience that made her both fearful and contemptuous of apparatchiks who act one way "when...
Sensing the time is ripe for a major mujahedin offensive, the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have reportedly given the go-ahead to the guerrillas. Renewed military pressure on his already demoralized forces could soon add Najibullah to the list of victims of the Soviet putsch...
...moves added up to a sweeping purge that apparently still has some way to go. Fourteen alleged coup plotters, including all seven surviving members of the so-called Emergency Committee that ran the putsch, were formally accused of treason, an offense punishable by imprisonment or death. The latest to be arrested was Anatoli Lukyanov, former chairman of the Supreme Soviet, who was ! taken into custody on Friday. During a session of the parliament earlier in the week devoted largely to finger pointing or to attempts by some members to convince others that they had nothing to do with the conspiracy...
...party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...