Word: pugo
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...soldiers and sailors teamed up with police last week on joint patrols in cities across the country, the question of just what they were there for took on fresh urgency. Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and Interior Minister Boris Pugo, who drafted the order in secret last Dec. 29, say the new patrols are intended to combat an odious side effect of economic and political liberalization: a steep rise in violent crime...
...spite of all this self-justification, Gorbachev denied that he gave the order to shoot. "I learned about what happened when they woke me up the next morning," he said. Interior Minister Boris Pugo and Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov shirked responsibility as well. The decision was made, said Yazov, by the army commander in Vilnius, whose assignment was to protect "all members of society...
...strengthen presidential authority. He announced plans to form civilian vigilante groups to combat black markets and profiteering, and put the KGB in charge of monitoring the distribution of foreign food. Most striking, he sacked Vadim Bakatin, the moderate Interior Minister, and replaced him with a two-man team: Boris Pugo, former chief of the Latvian KGB, as minister; and General Boris Gromov, an officer often said to favor a military coup (he denies it furiously), as Pugo's deputy...
...moment when the Soviet President seems to be retreating from democratic reform. "I want perestroika to succeed," Bush declared flatly. But Shevardnadze acknowledged a "certain instability" in Soviet society, igniting fears that a bad winter could prompt a retreat to more authoritarian tactics. Gorbachev recently appointed hard-liner Boris Pugo as Interior Minister and enlisted the KGB to crack down on black marketeers, whom some in the West view as the Soviet Union's fledgling entrepreneurs...
...Choosing Pugo may have seemed like a sop to restless conservatives, but appointing General Boris Gromov as Deputy Interior Minister showed that Gorbachev intends to put military muscle behind his calls for law-and-order. Gromov, who commanded the last contingent of Soviet forces to leave Afghanistan, has figured prominently at times in rumors that the military was plotting a coup. Gromov has denied the possibility of such a move, and he downplayed suggestions that his combat experience alone earned him his new job. But the connection was too evident to ignore. "Gromov is a reliable trigger puller," says William...