Word: yeltsin
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...strategic move in a long-range plan than a sudden turn taken by an enfeebled President preoccupied with survival. "The Kremlin's not playing chess," says Alexander Oslon, Russia's leading pollster. "They're playing checkers--they're living one day at a time." With the end of Yeltsin's second term 10 months away, the Family is beset by fear of humiliation, if not prosecution. ("The Ceausescu scenario," a Kremlin staff member calls it, recalling the collapse of Romania's dictatorship in 1989.) Ironically, the gravest threat may be neither Luzhkov nor the Chechen rebels but a corps...
Naturally, the sudden ascent of a Federal Security Service boss has raised the specter of unconstitutional moves. Inside Russia, Putin is known as an "ice-head" or tough hardened guy--not the ideal pedigree for shoring up the nation's rickety democratic system. But while Putin and Yeltsin could declare a state of emergency, disband the Duma or cancel elections, Kremlin aides insist that Yeltsin appreciates the importance of a peaceful transfer of power...
August is the cruelest month in Russian politics, a month that recalls low points like the 1991 coup attempt and last year's economic collapse. But this August, Yeltsin's final one in the Kremlin, has been particularly unkind. The Swiss are still probing, while Islamic separatists drag Russia yet again into the Caucasus quagmire and regional chieftains from St. Petersburg to Tatarstan hunger for a bigger slice of the federal powers. Yeltsin's final year was supposed to be dedicated to dignified business: handing over the Kremlin to an heir sworn to reforming Russia. He may yet succeed...
Oddly, that may be what Yeltsin wants. Wars in the North Caucasus remain in some eyes a credible excuse for imposing a state of emergency on Russia. Leaders of the Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian Parliament) indicated last week that they would be receptive to emergency measures--a plan that would allow Yeltsin to postpone elections and engineer a less than democratic transition. Hints of that fear were on display last week, as police tightened security around government buildings, airports and railway stations. Patrols clad in bulletproof vests showed up in the Moscow subway, and armor rolled...
Memo to Boris Yeltsin: If you dodecide to move Lenin's body from Red Square, you may want to convert his mausoleum into a McDonald's rather than try to knock it down. As Russia debates what to do with the bones of its first communist leader, his Bulgarian counterpart on Saturday got the last laugh on the country?s post-communist authorities. Georgi Dimitrov?s body was cremated shortly after the collapse of communism in 1990, but following a fierce national debate, the present government decided to finish the job by destroying his mausoleum in downtown Sofia. So with...