Word: baltic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Foreign buyers of all sorts and sources come shopping. Some work for multinational corporations with an eye to cheap supplies. Others are front men for organized crime or outlaw regimes, part of a swelling tide of agents who haunt export harbors on the Baltic Sea and travel the countryside. For help, many turn to Russians skilled in the use of blat (personal connections) and vzyatki (bribes) to oil the gears of the postempire black market...
...carries an Irish passport, there is a strong streak of Eire: the tale-spinning, the mordant thoughtfulness, the smile in his soft voice that lightens his remarks with a puckish irony. His father Cecil was the Irish-born poet laureate of England. His mother is actress Jill Balcon, whose Baltic Jewish father, Sir Michael Balcon, ran Ealing Studios, Britain's renowned comedy factory. Daniel's sister Tamasin, four years older, is a documentary filmmaker and writer on food...
...glory. Proclaiming slogans like "I'm just the same as you," he careens through Moscow in a motorcade of limousines, accompanied by a cadre of thuggish bodyguards that has included at least one member of the infamous Black Berets, the regiment of ^ Soviet commandos that once terrorized the Baltic states. Even now, notes Oberlin College's Frederick Starr, he adopts "the full trappings of a tin- horn dictator...
Although Moscow watchers in the West played down the possibility of a revanchist Russia, panicky East Europeans renewed their entreaties for prompt entry into NATO. Zhirinovsky's past pledge to reincorporate Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania into Russia had leaders of the three Baltic republics huddling to shore up international support for their independence. As editorialists in the capitals of Western Europe and Asia warned of "dangerous fascism," Vice President Al Gore cast Zhirinovsky's views as "reprehensible and anathema to all freedom-loving people...
...much of the old East bloc into the alliance, and Western policy planners immediately went to work on mechanisms for membership. First to join would be the so-called Visegrad countries -- Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary -- probably by the end of the '90s. Then might come the Baltic states -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia -- and in the more distant future the others, possibly including parts of the former Soviet Union, including Russia itself. German Defense Minister Volker Ruhe enthusiastically lobbied the rest of the alliance to put expansion on the agenda for a NATO summit scheduled for January...