Word: yeltsin
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Then, on April 25, the people would speak. Yeltsin planned to ask them in a nationwide referendum to give him a "vote of confidence," endorse a draft of a new constitution setting up a two-chamber parliament and approve a law setting up elections for this new legislative body. If the electorate said da three times, the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People's Deputies would quietly -- in theory -- pass out of existence, and the country would enjoy a spanking new, popularly elected, democratic and legitimate government...
What a bold and perhaps foolhardy move for a man who had seemed to lose his scrappy, street-fighting spirit in the yearlong struggle with the Congress. This was the old Yeltsin again, showing rebellious parliamentarians that he was ready to absorb whatever blows they delivered -- and then hit them harder than ever before. It may have come too late. His enemies threatened to impeach him before he could even get a popular vote organized. But on Sunday he won crucial support from the entire government, including the ministers of defense and security, that could keep him safe until April...
...battle to be waged in the next days and weeks could decide the fate of Russia for decades. Yeltsin is asking an exhausted, impoverished people to entrust their future as a democratic, free-market country to him and to depose the neocommunist forces who cling to the politics and economics of the past. No one knows if the opposition has become too strong for him to overcome. Or if a populace worn out by political crisis would answer the President's call. Or what the Russian military, itself split, would do if the stalemate worsened...
...rest of the world has an enormous stake in a game it can influence only marginally. Yeltsin may have exaggerated when he called his opponents cold warriors eager to reignite the global arms race and return to angry confrontations with the West. But an assertive Russia under a nationalist or neocommunist banner could be a disaster for its neighbors and the West. It would force reassessment of policies thoroughly changed by the end of the cold war. The prospect of facing an unfriendly Russia once more might force the Clinton Administration not just to cancel some planned Pentagon budget cuts...
...those reasons, the White House made up its mind to back the Russian President as strongly as it practically can. Clinton and his aides could see no alternative to Yeltsin who would not be much worse for the causes of free- market democracy in Russia and friendliness between the Kremlin and the White House. The Russian's promise of democracy as the goal of an interim semi-dictatorship gave the Administration a plausible excuse for making its support prompt and public -- though some officials confided that the backing would have been forthcoming, reluctantly, even if Yeltsin had acted more autocratically...