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Introduction: Russia: One Year After the Coup
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19975 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1992 |
709 Words |
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Although he still faces serious economic problems and political opposition from the old guard, Boris Yeltsin can point with justifiable pride to his first year as president of Russia.
Since the aborted coup in August 1991, the Yeltsin government has committed itself to a market economy, dissolved the Communist Party, broken up the KGB, signed a historic arms reduction agreement with the United States, and survived a winter that doomsayers wrongly predicted would bring widespread famine.
The result has been continued high approval ratings for Yeltsin in Russia and one of the most enthusiastic responses ever seen in the U.S. Congress for a foreign leader. Members of Congress stood and cheered when the Russian president appealed to them and the American people to join his country in making the world "safe for democracy." Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp called Yeltsin's speech "the Russian equivalent of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address--he spoke of the inalienable rights of man to democracy for the whole world."
Yeltsin returned home with high hopes that U.S. assistance would soon be forthcoming. He needs all the help he can get, and without delay, to solve a panoply of problems that would daunt the most secure and prosperous of nations--which Russia does not pretend to be after 70 years of Soviet communism.
As Prof. Herbert J. Ellison of the University of Washington points out in the lead article of this month's Special Report, the Russian leader has undertaken to build a free-market economy and a constitutional democracy in a country in which the legacy of communist ideology and institutions is still an overwhelming presence. At such a critical juncture in its history, argues Ellison, Russia needs a strong, even stern, leader--like Boris Yeltsin.
Experts inside and outside Russia are wondering whether the "shock therapy" of economic czar Yegor Gaidar will work. James Millar, director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, suggests that its success depends on whether the Russian government can develop a modern market economy and regulate it at the same time. Gaidar promises an economic turnaround in the next year or two, but most economists believe the transition process will take at least a decade.
Although domestic problems clearly receive top priority, Russia has foreign policy issues it cannot
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