Word: russianizing
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...boycotting it. To force out the powerholders, who uniformly despise him, Yeltsin may be thinking of something like Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution," street demonstrations fueled by an overwhelming wave of people power. But no matter how great his popularity, even Yeltsin will be hard put to mobilize the Russian masses in large enough numbers. They are mostly anti-Gorbachev and antigovernment, but their political inertia has been ingrained over centuries. Already their initial excitement and interest in the open politics of Gorbachev's demokratizatsiya have given way to apathy, cynicism and exhaustion...
...When thousands of coal miners went on strike in 1989, Gorbachev associated himself with their fight against management and emerged as a hero to the working class. Miners are striking in parts of the Ukraine and Siberia once again, but their leaders have turned to Yeltsin. Last week the Russian leader met with strike coordinators, who declared their full support for Yeltsin's political position and "readiness to support it with all possible nonviolent methods." Most miners are asking for higher wages, but some say their demand is purely political: the resignation of Gorbachev...
...Russians will remember Boris Yeltsin, who died Monday at age 76, for overseeing the economic reforms that reduced many of them to penury and for the geopolitical surrender that - briefly - rendered an erstwhile superpower irrelevant to global events. They will remember his thuggish treatment of political enemies and the brutal folly of his war in Chechnya; and they will remember the whiff of corruption over his inner circle and his bargain-basement sale of the Russian state's most lucrative economic assets to a cabal of oligarchs in exchange for their funding of his reelection in 1996. Indeed...
...Things came to a head in 1993. Russian politics were paralyzed and Yeltsin, with dubious constitutional justification, suspended parliament and called for new elections. When his foes in the legislature wouldn't leave, and accumulated a stockpile of arms, Yeltsin brought his tanks to the Parliament building. I remember watching from a rooftop across the street as the tanks fired shell after shell into Russia's highest legislative body. In the name of democracy, Russia's president had suspended, and now was bombing, his own parliament. And the West mostly went along, convinced that it was necessary to support this...
...Boris Yeltsin will be more fondly remembered, as the man who turned the menacing Russian bear of Cold War fear-mongering into a warm and cuddly creature, supine, pitiable and willing to perform in exchange for scraps. And for one glorious moment in the hot summer of 1991, when he stood atop a tank in front of the Russian White House and faced down a coup...