Word: yeltsin
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...week standoff between President Boris Yeltsin and former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, barricaded in the Parliament Building, finally flared into violence. Moscow turned into an open-air shooting range for Rutskoi's ragtag army of Communists, neo-Nazis and just plain hooligans dedicated to restoring the old Soviet Union. They came close to seizing the levers of power, but Yeltsin dispatched tanks to shell the parliament and quashed the rebellion...
...CONSTITUTION: A relic not worth defending. The 150 legislators who barricaded themselves in Moscow's White House last week claimed to be fighting against "Yeltsin's anticonstitutional regime." But the Constitution dates back to 1978 and was conceived when "parliament" was little more than a rubber stamp. The document fails to distinguish between the executive and legislative branches of government, offers no coherent foundation for lawmaking and has been amended over 300 times. The reason for parliament's loyalty to it: thanks to its inherent ambiguities, the Constitution serves as an ideal instrument for hamstringing Yeltsin...
...DEMOCRACY: Everybody's favorite Western-sounding word. The rebel legislators used it, but their aim was the antithesis of democracy -- to create a new form of dictatorship that would restore the authority and privileges they had lost. Yeltsin too has little claim to the term, particularly last week when he shut down newspapers, outlawed opposition parties and disbanded local legislatures...
...White House, the skyscraper parliament building they had sardonically renamed "the Black House." Wiping tears from her cheeks, a woman with henna-streaked gray hair said to fellow gawkers, "I don't know what Rutskoi would have been like as a leader, but I'm fed up with Yeltsin...
Americans, obsessed today with the image of a soldier's pale body dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, will find the power struggle in Russia a bigger worry in the long run. After the U.S. is out of Somalia, Yeltsin's foes will still be everywhere in Russia. The atavistic forces may have lost last week, but they will reorganize and wait for another opportunity...