Good Riddance
Karatnycky, Adrian
Sergei Stankevich, a top Yeltsin adviser, told me in early October: "Gorbachev and the central authorities are playing a destructive role. Central government structures are creating confusion. Their...
...And while the old Supreme Soviet had little legitimacy, the new parliament had none...
...Petersburg, matter-of-factly told the Interfax press agency no...
...In his last days in power, Mikhail Gorbachev increasingly was grasping at straws...
...They created a national anthem for their republic, provided for a free Russian press and television, extended the offer of Russian citizenship to countrymen living in other republics (going so far as to promise them a "law of return"), and began to define the economic and political prerogatives of sovereignty...
...On October 23, the Russian newscast "Vesti" reported that "the general crisis facing Mikhail Gorbachev has one further extremely important dimension...
...On October 12, he told a central television audience: "You know, I can't imagine that there can be a union without the Ukraine...
...Now this body and the USSR Supreme Soviet were no more, having been replaced by a Supreme Soviet designated by constituent republics...
...These questions will soon have to be resolved...
...His only claim to power had been election by the USSR Congress of People's Deputies that itself was elected in rigged and tainted elections in 1989...
...Good Riddance Mikhail Gorbachev will have resigned by the time you read this...
...Politicians in Moscow and Kiev don't even mention him...
...As Vladimir Bokser noted: "Yeltsin's allies decided to opt for the formula of a smaller Russia, but one that can begin to undertake real reforms...
...The existence of this dualism of center and republic is paralyzing reform...
...The process was slow and full of setbacks...
...That post, he said, "will soon be abolished...
...In this sense Gorbachev rules extraconstitutionally...
...But Yeltsin and the democrats pressed on...
...Spurned by his largest republics, he is now being abandoned by his closest aides...
...On November 4, the Soviet president was pleading with Russia to back the union...
...When asked on October 31 whether he was contemplating a run for the USSR presidency, Anatoly Sobchak, the popular mayor of St...
...The governments of the former Soviet republics have forgotten him...
...After all, she argued, Gorbachev was elected by a parliament that had virtually disbanded itself...
...Now, Gorbachev appears bitter and unstable...
...The main figure in this turnaround was 35-year-old economist Yegor Gaidar, now Russia's deputy prime minister...
...Yet the West continues to pretend that all three still exist...
...It was a transitional construct based on principles not foreseen in the current constitution...
...I think the Ukraine is an irreplaceable factor in the construction of a new union...
...AK The American Spectator February 1992 29...
...Demographics showed, too, that some two million Russians had left the non-Russian republics in the 1980s to return to the motherland...
...He is irrelevant...
...Andrei Sakharov, noted that there was no legal basis for Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential status...
...His domestic press ignores him: in recent months, Soviet and Russian evening newscasts have led with reports on Boris Yeltsin or the comings and goings of the Russian and Ukrainian parliaments...
...Their main role is to sow confusion...
...On October 20, he warned that unilateral actions by Ukraine and other republics to raise their own armies was unconstitutional...
...On October 21, he told "Mayak" radio listeners that economic aid depends on preserving a central state: "We value the solidarity of the international community, which wants to see the union as a democratic state with a predictable policy...
...The report noted that "Gorbachev probably had a direct relationship in the diversion of funds designated for humanitarian aid to our country and their transfer into the hands of foreign Communist parties...
...Bonner prophetically pointed out: "We are dealing with a country that has no name, has no clear idea of its borders, and has no legitimate government...
...The Soviet president may be charged with violations of the law...
...When in May 1990 two parliamentarians—Christian Democrat Vladimir Aksyuchits and Social Democrat Oleg Rumyantsev—unfurled small Russian tricolor flags at a session of the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, they were jeered by a majority of their colleagues...
...While visiting Washington in late October, Yelena Bonner, the human rights activist and widow of Dr...
...That the Army is throwing its weight behind Kravchuk, Yeltsin, and Shushkevich is only part of Gorbachev's problem...
...Concluding that it would be folly to wait for other republics to fall into line, he announced that Russia would create its own currency, launch its own price reforms, and proceed with a fast-paced privatization...
...Managers and administrators are uncertain about which regulations, laws, and decrees to obey...
...Yeltsin's embrace of Russian democratic nationalism first surfaced in March 1990, when he and other members of his Democratic Russia electoral bloc advanced the idea of Russia's state sovereignty in response to polling data thatshowed a fundamental shift in Russian public opinion...
...After the banning of the party to which he had given his life came the collapse of the empire he had sworn to defend...
...By mid-November, as a member of President Yeltsin's delegation to Bonn, Fyodorov was still suggesting, this time to the German public, that Gorbachev was criminally culpable...
...They developed a Russian constitution and ensured the democratic election of a Russian president...
...Among a majority of Russians, weary of the burdens of empire, a new, inward-looking Russian patriotism was taking root...
...By December 9, when he denounced the new Russian-BelarusianUkrainian Commonwealth as "illegal," the game was up...
...On October 28, Yeltsin moved decisively to resolve them...
...In many other countries, similar facts would lead to the resignation of the president...
...By the end of 1991, Gorbachev was noticed only when he traveled abroad, shining in the reflected celebrity of George Bush and Francois Mitterrand...
...As Mrs...
...Just the day before, Russia's justice minister, Nikolai Fyodorov, had asserted to the Russian parliament that in 1990 Gorbachev sanctioned the funneling of Western aid money back overseas to prop up Communist parties in the West...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 2
