Word: yeltsin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Communist Party rule. The Congress decided not to take up the contentious question of Article 6, voting 1,138 to 839, with 56 abstentions. But the margin of victory was not so comfortable that the Kremlin could indefinitely ignore the East European-like rush to multiparty politics. Boris Yeltsin, the ex-Politburo member turned radical populist, urged the leadership to learn the lessons of East Germany, where reforms were delayed so long that they were eventually accomplished within a week -- "without ((Erich)) Honecker...
...official journal of the Soviet movie industry. Its appearance reflects a mood of unprecedented pessimism and self-doubt, in which intellectuals and political figures have been speculating somberly about the catastrophes that could befall the Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt audience at New York's Council on Foreign Relations. Yeltsin gave Gorbachev until next fall to produce results. Others have warned of an actual civil war by then...
...coup from the right. A hint of the first surfaced last summer, when half a million Soviet miners went on strike. The miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable...
...second scenario of Soviet catastrophe is a coup from the Soviet "right" engineered by the army, perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia...
...including Stoph; Erich Mielke, head of the despised state security apparatus; and Kurt Hager, chief party ideologist. Hans Modrow, 61, the Dresden party leader, was named to the Politburo and will be Premier in the new government. He has been likened alternately to Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the reformist thorn in the Soviet President's side. Some conservatives, however, remain in the reshaped Politburo, and the way Krenz rammed his slate through the Central Committee was scarcely an exercise in democracy...