Word: yanayev
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Dates: during 1991-1991
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...They gave me two options -- to hand my office over to ((Vice President Gennadi)) Yanayev and give the nod to the state of emergency, or to step down. They even tried to threaten me. I told them, 'You guys must have known I wouldn't agree to either. You're staging a coup d'etat. What you are trying to do with your committee is anticonstitutional and unlawful. This is adventurism that will result in bloodshed and civil war.' The general started trying to prove to me that they would see to it that such a thing wouldn't happen...
...past two years French President FRANCOIS MITTERRAND, 74, has made an unbroken string of political blunders, and now people are beginning to question his ability to understand a rapidly changing international scene. His latest mistake: publicly concluding that Gennadi Yanayev and his co- conspirators were "the men in charge" and calling sanctions "premature." This follows Mitterrand's efforts to broker a peace plan just hours before the deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and his vain / attempt to halt German unification...
Former Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov were deep into the toasts at a 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...
Perhaps because he wasn't sure with whom he might next deal, Bush sounded a hopeful note that morning about Gennadi Yanayev, Gorbachev's handpicked Vice President and the coup's titular leader. Yanayev, as it happened, had joined Bush as a guest on board Air Force One when the President flew from Moscow to Kiev during his summit trip just 18 days earlier. "My gut instinct," Bush said, "was that he has a certain commitment to reform." Bush also took care to describe the coup as "extraconstitutional," fearing that "unconstitutional" was too strong and might offend the plotters...
...White House immediately began to retreat from Bush's earlier ambivalent remarks and voice support for Yeltsin. Scowcroft spoke with reporters in midair, criticizing Yanayev and describing the coup as "quite negative." After arriving at the White House, Bush sat in on a meeting of the deputies committee, a group of senior officials who were monitoring the situation and were by then beginning to uncover the plotters' mistakes. Several members of the group had begun to describe the coup as "half-assed...