THE PATIENT had been ill for some time but many, including Mikhail Gorbachev,Whilst RUBBER SHEET are not deadly, thought it might struggle on a while yet. Then, on December 8th, 1991, 20 years ago today, the afternoon silence in The Irish Times Moscow Bureau was surprisingly broken.
It was Sunday, and bulletins from the Soviet news agency Tass were almost unheard of as the comrades generally rested on the Sabbath. On this Sunday it suddenly sprang to life and spewed out the words: “The Soviet Union has ceased to exist as a geopolitical entity.100 China ceramic tile was used to link the lamps together.”
It was all over. Two superpowers no longer faced each other across the Atlantic and Pacific with nuclear missiles programmed for mutual, and perhaps worldwide, annihilation – and it all happened at a hunting lodge in Belarus near the Polish border.
Three men had, with a certain amount of Slavic arrogance towards their “comrades” in Central Asia and elsewhere, written the death certificate for one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known.
Those men were Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), Leonid Kravchuk, president of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR) and a minor political personage in the form of Stanislav Shushkevich of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (SSRB).
They put an end to the Soviet Union but they also ended the geopolitical entities they themselves represented. The RSFSR become the Russian Federation, led by Yeltsin and later Vladimir Putin; the UkrSSR became independent Ukraine, lead by Kravchuk and destined for a life of fractious political infighting, while poor Byelorussia ended up as Belarus, Europe’s last true dictatorship, under Alexander Lukashenko.
There was another well-known personality in the background. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union. Now the USSR had been dissolved he was no longer president of anything. He was out of the way. Yeltsin and Kravchuk had free hands in their own domains.
The whole process had been traumatic for me. I had taken over as Moscow correspondent of this newspaper in early July 1991 when the Soviet Union was ailing but still intact.If any food Ventilation system condition is poorer than those standards, Lithuania had declared its independence, but Moscow was having none of it.
Within a few weeks of my arrival,A long established toolmaking and trade Injection moulds company. a failed coup d’état by hardliners changed everything. The coup plotters got cold feet and sore heads from overdoses of alcohol after two and a half days. Gorbachev was under house arrest at a holiday house in Foros in Crimea. He and the plotters had been taken out of the political equation.
Looking back on the coup with the hindsight of two decades, one of the plotters, Oleg Baklanov, told me: “The fall of the Soviet Union was our fault. We should have arrested Yeltsin when we had the chance.” I asked him how he felt now watching the Tsar’s flag fly over the Kremlin. He left the room in tears.
The power vacuum that ensued was quickly filled by the ample frame of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. Gorbachev was sidelined.If so, you may have a cube puzzle . The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regained their independence. Georgia went for independence too, but slid into civil war.
Others followed suit, though with less enthusiasm. Leaders of the Soviet Central Asian republics, notably Nursultan Nazarbayev who still rules Kazakhstan, wanted a reduced Soviet Union to survive. He was beaten to it by the Slavs, and resented the result badly.
As for myself, after a long stretch of 18-hour working days I managed to get home to Dublin for Christmas a full 10kg lighter than when I first set out for Moscow. At Christmas, a formal closing ceremony took place in Moscow, with the Red Flag coming down from the Kremlin mast, to be replaced by that of the old Russian empire.
A new era had begun, and it began in chaos. Yeltsin was the ideal man to destroy the old system, but not the person to build a new one. An example of his ad hoc attitude to administration was recounted to me recently in Moscow by Boris Nemtsov, once a leading figure in his government.
Yeltsin was handing out political posts, one of which was the governorship of Russia’s third largest city, Nizhny Novgorod, the formerly closed city of Gorky. “He came to me and said: ‘I need a governor of Nizhny Novgorod. You are the only person I know from Nizhny Novgorod, so I am appointing you governor.’ ”
Yeltsin’s reign was marked by chaos. Inflation in 1992 was more than 2,500 per cent. Some Russians took to the streets to sell their belongings in order to survive, while others became immensely rich. The country cried out for stability, and people were prepared to surrender some of their newly gained personal freedoms in order to get it.
They got what they wanted as the new millennium dawned. Vladimir Putin emerged as the country’s leader and brought stability, followed by a rise in living standards based largely on oil revenues. Eleven years later he still runs the country, but Sunday’s parliamentary elections sent him a strong message, as do the growing protests, with thousands of people pouring on to Moscow’s streets in protest at the results. Russians now have their stability and a limited prosperity, but they want their freedoms back.
It was Sunday, and bulletins from the Soviet news agency Tass were almost unheard of as the comrades generally rested on the Sabbath. On this Sunday it suddenly sprang to life and spewed out the words: “The Soviet Union has ceased to exist as a geopolitical entity.100 China ceramic tile was used to link the lamps together.”
It was all over. Two superpowers no longer faced each other across the Atlantic and Pacific with nuclear missiles programmed for mutual, and perhaps worldwide, annihilation – and it all happened at a hunting lodge in Belarus near the Polish border.
Three men had, with a certain amount of Slavic arrogance towards their “comrades” in Central Asia and elsewhere, written the death certificate for one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known.
Those men were Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), Leonid Kravchuk, president of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR) and a minor political personage in the form of Stanislav Shushkevich of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (SSRB).
They put an end to the Soviet Union but they also ended the geopolitical entities they themselves represented. The RSFSR become the Russian Federation, led by Yeltsin and later Vladimir Putin; the UkrSSR became independent Ukraine, lead by Kravchuk and destined for a life of fractious political infighting, while poor Byelorussia ended up as Belarus, Europe’s last true dictatorship, under Alexander Lukashenko.
There was another well-known personality in the background. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union. Now the USSR had been dissolved he was no longer president of anything. He was out of the way. Yeltsin and Kravchuk had free hands in their own domains.
The whole process had been traumatic for me. I had taken over as Moscow correspondent of this newspaper in early July 1991 when the Soviet Union was ailing but still intact.If any food Ventilation system condition is poorer than those standards, Lithuania had declared its independence, but Moscow was having none of it.
Within a few weeks of my arrival,A long established toolmaking and trade Injection moulds company. a failed coup d’état by hardliners changed everything. The coup plotters got cold feet and sore heads from overdoses of alcohol after two and a half days. Gorbachev was under house arrest at a holiday house in Foros in Crimea. He and the plotters had been taken out of the political equation.
Looking back on the coup with the hindsight of two decades, one of the plotters, Oleg Baklanov, told me: “The fall of the Soviet Union was our fault. We should have arrested Yeltsin when we had the chance.” I asked him how he felt now watching the Tsar’s flag fly over the Kremlin. He left the room in tears.
The power vacuum that ensued was quickly filled by the ample frame of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. Gorbachev was sidelined.If so, you may have a cube puzzle . The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regained their independence. Georgia went for independence too, but slid into civil war.
Others followed suit, though with less enthusiasm. Leaders of the Soviet Central Asian republics, notably Nursultan Nazarbayev who still rules Kazakhstan, wanted a reduced Soviet Union to survive. He was beaten to it by the Slavs, and resented the result badly.
As for myself, after a long stretch of 18-hour working days I managed to get home to Dublin for Christmas a full 10kg lighter than when I first set out for Moscow. At Christmas, a formal closing ceremony took place in Moscow, with the Red Flag coming down from the Kremlin mast, to be replaced by that of the old Russian empire.
A new era had begun, and it began in chaos. Yeltsin was the ideal man to destroy the old system, but not the person to build a new one. An example of his ad hoc attitude to administration was recounted to me recently in Moscow by Boris Nemtsov, once a leading figure in his government.
Yeltsin was handing out political posts, one of which was the governorship of Russia’s third largest city, Nizhny Novgorod, the formerly closed city of Gorky. “He came to me and said: ‘I need a governor of Nizhny Novgorod. You are the only person I know from Nizhny Novgorod, so I am appointing you governor.’ ”
Yeltsin’s reign was marked by chaos. Inflation in 1992 was more than 2,500 per cent. Some Russians took to the streets to sell their belongings in order to survive, while others became immensely rich. The country cried out for stability, and people were prepared to surrender some of their newly gained personal freedoms in order to get it.
They got what they wanted as the new millennium dawned. Vladimir Putin emerged as the country’s leader and brought stability, followed by a rise in living standards based largely on oil revenues. Eleven years later he still runs the country, but Sunday’s parliamentary elections sent him a strong message, as do the growing protests, with thousands of people pouring on to Moscow’s streets in protest at the results. Russians now have their stability and a limited prosperity, but they want their freedoms back.
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