Word: baltic
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Beyond the specific complaints against Gorbachev, there is a deeper grievance. Because of both the position and the convictions he holds, he is identified with the very idea of a Soviet Union that stretches from Tallinn on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific. That idea is finished. The U.S.S.R. was kept together by force; it now has the freedom to come apart...
...year later, as elected governments from the Baltic to the Black Sea struggle with the complexities of democracy and the harsh realities of the marketplace, often hampered by old demons like nationalism and populism, an awareness is growing that the full dues have yet to be paid. Whatever the sacrifices made over the past 12 months -- or the preceding four decades of communist rule -- citizens in every liberated East European nation are acknowledging that those were merely small down payments on freedom...
...major question: since the 1922 constitution setting up the Soviet Union * would be dissolved, would republics be able to secede merely by refusing to sign the new treaty? Grigori Revenko, a member of Gorbachev's current Presidential Council, has suggested that the rebellious Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, at least, would not be allowed to go as easily as that; they would still have to negotiate with Moscow over property issues. And they might not be the only ones. Akaky Asatiani, a leader of the Georgian parliament, said flatly last week that Georgia "will not sign the federal...
...pattern for others to follow: Marju Lauristin, the deputy speaker of the Estonian parliament; Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene; and Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, parliamentary president of East Germany until the recent union of the two Germanys. Between them, Lauristin and Prunskiene have managed to place the Baltic struggle for independence high on the world's political agenda...
From Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Tadzhikistan in the Pamir mountains of Central Asia, the Soviet Union is coming apart at the seams. The U.S.S.R. as such might soon cease to exist. In its place may be a smaller, though still ! vast, country, perhaps called simply Russia, while Estonia and Tadzhikistan could be two of a dozen or more Soviet republics that become independent countries. If that happens, the world will have lost not only its first communist state but also its last great multinational empire...