Word: yeltsin
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...this talk -- and it was very loud in the Russian capital last week -- arises not out of the usual Moscow rumor mill but from the country's desperate need for explanations. Worried Russians are struggling to understand why there is such an obvious, crashing contrast between what Yeltsin says about the nasty little war in Chechnya and what everyone knows is really happening in the secessionist North Caucasus republic...
What no one knows is what is really happening in the Kremlin, and Russians and foreigners alike find themselves rehoning the deductive tools of what used to be called Kremlinology. The way the Chechnya crisis is being mishandled suggests Yeltsin's presidency and Russia's fragile political liberalization may be in danger. Is Yeltsin going to go down in history as the first President of a democratic Russia or as one more overseer of an authoritarian state...
...dominated by the "power ministers," such men as Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and Interior Minister Victor Yerin. Some veteran Moscow watchers are reminded of the last year of the Mikhail Gorbachev era, when the father of glasnost and perestroika tried to crack down on independence-minded Lithuania. Others watch Yeltsin take the lead, then fade, and recall Leonid Brezhnev's lingering, fatal lassitude...
...years Yeltsin has alternated between almost frenetic bursts of activity and long periods of vacation or unexplained absence. His foes attribute this pattern to bouts of presidential tippling, while his aides put the blame on his chronic back problems and his tendency to work himself into exhaustion. Whatever the causes, he has been an erratic Chief Executive...
True to form, Yeltsin stepped offstage three weeks ago -- into the Kremlin hospital for repair of a deviated septum -- at the same time that he ordered the Russian armed forces to seize control in Chechnya and disarm the supporters of its defiant president, Jokhar Dudayev. The disappearance of Yeltsin and his failure to explain the decision to use force began a new round of speculation about his health and his competence to handle his job. Though U.S. Vice President Al Gore visited him and reported that he was fine, the rumors continued...