YELTSIN CHAIRS SECURITY COUNCIL SESSION, MARKS COUP ANNIVERSARY.

President Boris Yeltsin opened a meeting of Russia’s powerful Security Council this morning with a call for renewed efforts to bring peace to Russia’s troubled North Caucasus. (BBC, August 20) Yesterday, Yeltsin marked the sixth anniversary of the failed coup of August 1991 by telling journalists that, had the plotters won, "we would not now have a democratic country advancing along the road to reform." Communists and nationalists are marking the anniversary this week with a series of low-key rallies and demonstrations, while former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, ousted from power as a result of the coup, used the occasion to launch another attack on Yeltsin for undermining Gorbachev’s efforts to keep the USSR intact and to reform it in the process. (AP, August 19)

Boris Versus Boris.