Word: yeltsin
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...Sometimes, it's simply a token nod - such as President Bush-senior's offering of California Beluga Sturgeon to President Boris Yeltsin in 1992, in a menu that was otherwise more French than anything else. Similarly when the Reagan White House faced the challenge of coming up with something distinctly Canadian to entertain Brian Mulroney in 1988: Smoked salmon and shrimp mousse with dilled cucumber sauce, before an otherwise distinctly Californian fest of roast loin of veal, tarragon sauce, puree of sweet red peppers, spring asparagus, watercress and radicchio salad...
...views on post-Soviet Russia offer pause for thought: "One might have imagined that things could not have got worse than the point to which Communism had brought us," Solzhenitsyn recently told the New Yorker. "It seemed that any effort at all would bring something better. On the contrary. Yeltsin managed to bring Russia even lower. He supported thieves. Our national riches and resources were privatized nearly for free, and even the new mobsters are not asked to pay any rent. The state has become a pauper...
...have spent three days dead drunk. This may be so, but it was not key reason for failure. The junta suffered a failure of nerve, but its biggest problem was a lack of decisive leadership. By his one act of defiance on the first day of the coup, Yeltsin claimed the initiative. If the junta had included someone with Yeltsin's determination, the outcome of the coup may have been very different...
...Yeltsin was not only brave; he was very lucky. The world's media focused on the crowds outside the Russian White House, where he was holed up. The atmosphere there was indeed inspiring -thousands of people prepared to shield with their bodies their last hope for change. Yet these many thousand people were a tiny fraction of the city's population, And there were few such demonstrations in other cities and towns across the USSR. Most people were sitting and waiting. Would the military have moved against the White House if someone had given the order? Some would have...
...fact when Yeltsin decided to attack the same building in 1993, he showed how easy it was if you were sufficiently ruthless. He had tanks shell it from a distance. And again, in that incident, he showed the importance of decisive leadership. Yeltsin had to pull himself out of profound, paralyzing depression in order in order to cajole military commanders into attacking, but he eventually scraped together the forces he needed. Well over100 people died in the attack, though no-one really remembers now and the world did not seem particularly concerned at the time...