Word: putsch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first learned of the putsch at about 5 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 18, when an agitated Gorbachev told her that a group of men had arrived from Moscow to see him and that all the phone lines were dead, including the "red phone" that links the President to the Minister of Defense. The whole family quickly agreed they would stick by the President at all costs. "This was a very serious decision," Raisa told Trud. "We know our history." This may have been a reference to the Bolsheviks' grisly execution of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and his family...
Raisa told Trud, "I never thought such a thing ((as the coup)) could happen to us." But in her autobiography, I Hope (HarperCollins; $20), completed four months before the failed putsch, the Soviet First Lady says she has long been anxious about the "fierce struggle now going on between loyalty and treachery" in the Soviet Union. In the book, actually an extended interview with Soviet writer Georgi Pryakhin, Raisa discloses for the first time that her grandfather was executed under Stalin, an experience that made her both fearful and contemptuous of apparatchiks who act one way "when...
Sensing the time is ripe for a major mujahedin offensive, the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have reportedly given the go-ahead to the guerrillas. Renewed military pressure on his already demoralized forces could soon add Najibullah to the list of victims of the Soviet putsch...
...message aimed not only at fellow Deputies but also abroad, particularly at the Oval Office. The avalanche of decrees that Yeltsin issued in the immediate wake of the putsch, coupled with his initial high-handed treatment of Gorbachev, did much to undermine the goodwill and trust that Yeltsin had built with the Bush Administration during the heady three days of the coup. Wariness prevailed last week. "The man clearly has courage and political talent," said a White House insider. "But he's also clearly a demagogue and an opportunist, and we'd be fools if we didn't worry about...
...party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...