Word: shakhrai
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...merit public attention. But when a private car forced a speeding government Volga sedan into oncoming traffic last week, causing the Volga to sideswipe another car, somersault across four lanes and knock down a tree, some Russian officials called the crash an assassination attempt. Why? The Volga carried Sergei Shakhrai, former Russian Deputy Prime Minister and President Boris Yeltsin's top lawyer in a court case that will decide the fate of the Communist Party...
...Shakhrai, who is trying to prove that the party, which Yeltsin banned last year, was an illegal institution even under Soviet law, emerged from the smashed car with only a bruised shoulder. His bodyguard, who was thrown through the windshield, broke both legs, and his chauffeur suffered an injured spine. The mystery driver sped away, leading some of Shakhrai's colleagues to suspect foul play. "We don't know yet whether it was just an ordinary traffic accident," a spokesman said. As the investigation began, Shakhrai, who dismissed the assassination theory, returned to work...
...structure ruled by an elite who pulled the strings of a puppet parliament, government and judicial system. The case will be based on a trail of paper evidence linking the party leadership to almost every decision of importance -- or unimportance -- made in the Soviet Union. Says presidential lawyer Sergei Shakhrai: "We will show how the Politburo passed laws, not the parliament; how it rendered judicial verdicts, not the Supreme Court; how it managed the economy and launched space flights, not government agencies. It was the Communist Party that created the Soviet Union and also brought about its downfall...
...hearings, which could last several weeks, have been compared in impact to the postwar Nuremberg trials of Germany's Nazi leaders. But Yeltsin's men say they have no desire to start a witch-hunt against specific party officials, including Gorbachev. "There are no victors and no vanquished," says Shakhrai. "People should be tried only for criminal actions, not because they were members of the party nomenklatura." Another team lawyer, Andrei Makarov, puts it more succinctly: "We do not want to turn these hearings into a political show...
...press conference last week, Shakhrai displayed a tantalizing foretaste: a May 1975 order that directed the KGB to provide arms to one of the most militant Palestinian terrorist organizations, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, based in Syria. The weaponry was to be used, said Shakhrai, "to carry out operations against American and Israeli personnel in third countries...