Word: remnick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Soviet days began, Remnick believes, not with perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to restructure socialism, but with glasnost -- the readiness to face facts -- and Gorbachev's call to fill in the "blank spots" of history. By losing control of the past, the Communist Party began to lose control of its present -- and future. "The return of history," Remnick writes, "was the start of the great reform of the twentieth century and, whether Gorbachev liked it or not, the collapse of the last empire on earth...
...head down and mouth shut. They began speaking and writing about the old taboos: the crimes of Stalin, of the KGB and even of Lenin. Soon the daily and weekly press was bursting with stupefying revelations and admissions. It was "wonderful for the intelligentsia," the writer Tatyana Tolstaya told Remnick, but most of all "it is a revolution for the proletariat...
That revolution was taken over in July 1989 by the Siberian coal miners when they began a strike that shook the economy and the communist bosses. The grimy miners, Remnick reports, were forging a link between the urban intellectuals, the nationalist movements in non-Russian republics, and "the political uprising of workers across the country...
...Remnick concludes that Gorbachev's propensity to reform faded when he lost control of political events and his former followers became leaders. A "bitter, deluded" Gorbachev increasingly put his faith in old comrades from the party, the army and the KGB, who flattered him, warned him of dark plots and then betrayed...
When the old hacks, led by KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, launched their putsch in 1991, Remnick spent the crucial August days and nights with Boris Yeltsin and his backers at the Russian Parliament Building. For the most part, the thousands who stood up for democracy at the Russian White House did it for the man they had elected, Yeltsin. "It wasn't about Gorbachev," one woman told Remnick. "Gorbachev got what he deserved...