Word: gorbachev
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...Talk-show hosts and columnists nearly lost their heads interpreting the paper. Was Medvedev actually taking a stand against Putin? Were they preparing to face off for the presidency in 2012? In the weeks that followed, nearly every public intellectual responded to the piece, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and oil mogul Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had been stripped of his assets and imprisoned under Putin for fraud. Most of them were skeptical. "It is absolutely clear that one leader cannot modernize the country alone, even the strongest leader, if he has no support base of his own," Khodorkovsky wrote...
...from this. Of course we can just pull out fast, without thinking of anything and blame the former leadership who started all this." The dilemma may sound familiar as the Obama Administration weighs General Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops, but the quote comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party, during a debate that raged in the Kremlin during 1986 and 1987. Moscow was grappling with some of the same issues eight years after the Red Army invaded Afghanistan that President Obama today faces, eight years after U.S. troops went in. And eavesdropping...
...independent National Security Archive at George Washington University recently translated chronicles of the Soviet discussion, mostly from notes taken by Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev's senior foreign policy aide at the time. While the U.S. insists it is not an occupying force as the Soviets were, both missions faced many of the same challenges. "We should honestly admit that our efforts over the last eight years have not led to the expected results," a senior military commander confided to Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov in an August 1987 letter. "Huge material resources and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result...
...Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, six years after the Soviet invasion, was flummoxed by the situation he had inherited from his predecessors. Obama too: "For six years, Afghanistan has been denied the resources that it demands because of the war in Iraq," the President said in March in a clear slap at the Bush Administration...
...Newly in power and untested, Gorbachev faced some of the same pressures to prove his mettle as Obama now feels. So he gave the Soviet military one last shot at turning things around, according to Gates, who was the No. 2 man in the CIA at the time. "During Gorbachev's first 18 months in power, we saw new, more aggressive Soviet tactics, a spread of the war to the eastern provinces, attacks inside Pakistan, and more indiscriminate use of air power," Gates wrote in his 1996 autobiography. But it failed to turn the tide. So in February 1988, Gorbachev...