Word: yazov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Komsomolskaya Pravda the next day achieved a bizarre fusion of conservative-radical coup rumors; it said ; military forces had been put on alert in early September to thwart a planned takeover by radicals who had organized armed assault groups. "The facts in this article were invented," Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov protested in Parliament. "No one is is preparing paratroopers for actions against the people." But even that did not kill the conspiracy talk. Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov and members of the Russian Federation government charged that Communist Party provocateurs and military hard-liners were trying to organize phony reformist rallies...
Western diplomats think a coup is highly unlikely; the Soviet military has a long tradition of subservience to civilian authority and neither the will nor the unity to break it. But there have in fact been military movements in the Moscow area. Yazov and Kryuchkov have said that many of the troops are helping to bring in the potato harvest, and Western correspondents wandering through potato fields outside Moscow have encountered soldiers who really were digging up spuds. The defense and KGB chiefs, however, also insist that some troops are preparing for the Nov. 7 Revolution Day parade, an assertion...
...Lopatin, a young Deputy and major in the naval forces, has taken up the cause. He has drafted a challenging 15-page reform plan calling for a phased transition to a professional army while permitting the republics to set up their own corps in the interim. Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov has categorically rejected these proposals, arguing that a smaller all-volunteer army would be too expensive and too risky in a country with more then 37,000 miles of borders to defend. But Lopatin has already begun to attract followers. The young officer's feisty attacks in parliament...
...Moscow celebrated the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany last week, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov insisted that the Baltic states had been "liberated" by the Red Army, not occupied, as the secessionists contend. "We were met with flowers," said Yazov. But Soviet officials were the targets, of brickbats rather than bouquets in the three Baltic capitals, which jointly announced an agreement for the direct trading of their agricultural products among themselves, cutting out Soviet ministries...
...implicit criticism of Gorbachev, Defense Minister Yazov has counter- attacked on the issue of budget cuts. "It is economically groundless and politically shortsighted," he said recently, "to try to make the reduction of defense expenditures the sole method of liquidating the budget deficit and the resolution of all of today's social problems." He went further, arguing that a modernization that would shift the emphasis from mass-conscript armies to smaller forces with high-tech weaponry would cost more, not less. The idea of eventually dropping the draft and adopting a volunteer professional army is still opposed by most...