Word: baltic
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...drive home his point, the fires of defiance and threatened revolution burned brightly throughout the Soviet Union last week. From the southern Caucasus republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia to the Baltic states in the north, ethnic tensions flared and independence movements battled with Communist Party officials. The most troubled spots...
Haunted by nightmares of blood in Tiananmen Square, Rumania and even Tbilisi last April, when Soviet troops massacred 19 protesters, Moscow is reluctant to use force to maintain control in the republics. It is also possible to contemplate the three Baltic states seceding without the entire union unraveling. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are relatively recent additions to the union. Furthermore, unlike many of the other republics, the Baltics were independent at the time of their incorporation. There is, therefore, a historical basis for treating them as a special case. Perhaps the Kremlin aims to do just that. Last week Soviet...
...Baltic republics, secessionist passion is inversely proportional to the percentage of ethnic Russians living there. Lithuania has the smallest Russian population; hence Gorbachev received the region's most emotional dose of separatism. Nonetheless, there was something exhilarating about seeing the leader of the Soviet Union debating citizens in the streets. Thomas Jefferson could not have asked for a better illustration of democracy in action, though Gorbachev may have wished for an experience a shade less vivid...
Like the other two Baltic republics, Lithuania has already been given control of its own economy. Its demands for political independence, however, mean different things to different demanders. If the Baltic state were ever to declare its complete independence from the U.S.S.R., that freedom would carry a price...
This latest sign of fragmentation in Mikhail Gorbachev's multi-ethnic empire comes just as he is trying to defuse the growing threat of secession by the three Baltic republics. Lithuania's Communist Party has already declared its independence from Moscow headquarters, and the Estonian and Latvian organizations are considering similar moves toward local autonomy. Gorbachev plans to visit the area this week in search of compromise. Now he must look southward as well, to festering nationality problems in Azerbaijan -- and the long-feared spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into the six predominantly Muslim republics of the U.S.S.R...