Word: yeltsin
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They came by the tens of thousands, some bearing posters depicting the jubilant face of Boris Yeltsin, others holding placards demanding the removal of Mikhail Gorbachev. By noon on a chilly Sunday, more than 200,000 people filled the vastness of Manezh Square outside the crenellated walls of the Kremlin. As a speaker shouted out resolutions, the crowd voted overwhelmingly for authorities to stop persecuting Yeltsin, leader of the Russian republic, and for Gorbachev to resign as Soviet President. Addressing the throng, Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov asked, "Do we trust the leadership of the country?" The crowd roared back...
...father of perestroika and glasnost, the brilliant if testy infighter whose policies not only failed to put bread on the table but spurred most of the country's 15 republics to loosen if not actually break the ties that bind them to Moscow. On the other side is Boris Yeltsin, the Lazarus of Soviet politics, the blunt-spoken and somewhat erratic brawler of the streets who seems intent on leading a revolution against the Kremlin...
...battle must be particularly frustrating for Gorbachev, who prides himself on opening up his country's political process to divergent voices, but surely never expected a voice as brash as Yeltsin's to carry so much popular weight. Nothing if not spontaneous, Yeltsin demanded on live television last month that Gorbachev resign. Only a few short years ago, he would have landed in the Gulag for such an attack on the leader of the Soviet Union. Today a verbal assault on Yeltsin by Gorbachev's allies only seems to increase the Russian leader's standing among the people...
Like Gorbachev, Yeltsin hopes to bend the referendum to his own purposes. The second question on the ballot in Russia is whether the republic should establish a directly elected presidency. Voters are likely to say they do want to choose their own leader, and Yeltsin is likely to win an election. He will then be ready to do battle with Gorbachev on a more equal footing. With a huge power base and an electoral mandate, Yeltsin will face a national leader who has never been popularly elected but has massive institutional power at his command...
...Kasparov and some other dissidents, the original sin of the new Russia was the 1996 presidential election, in which--with the help of massive injections of funds from business oligarchs--Boris Yeltsin won re-election over Gennady Zyuganov, the Communists' leader. Kasparov now says that he and other liberals made a "horrible mistake when we endorsed Yeltsin and looked the other way out of fear for a communist comeback. We missed the whole point that democracy is not about results. Democracy is about upholding regulations and having a legitimate transfer of power...