Word: baltic
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...Baltic republics, it is often said, are the "laboratory" of Mikhail Gorbachev's experiment in liberalization. The metaphor captures the exhilaration and ominousness of what is happening, both there in the Baltics and throughout the U.S.S.R. Glasnost, elections and free-market economics will help save the Soviet system from itself, or the mixture will explode...
Increasingly, Baltic leaders are hearing demands for "national rights." For some proponents the phrase means full sovereignty, now. For others it means autonomy within a radically more lenient U.S.S.R. Estonian officials are busily planning to introduce their own currency, airline and diplomatic missions abroad. The so-called popular fronts, with their platforms calling for regional self-determination, are well on their way to taking over the power structure. The secessionists and the federalists disagree about tactics and timetable, but not about the dream of independence...
...increasingly defiant tone of the nationalists has provoked the ire of hard-liners in the Soviet leadership. In a harsh blast read over national television, the Communist Party Central Committee denounced the protests as an attempt "to incite the peoples of the Baltic republics to secede from the Soviet Union." The Central Committee criticized local party leaders for "playing up to nationalist sentiments," and called for "resolute, urgent measures to cleanse the Baltic republics of extremism and destructive and harmful tendencies...
...statement did not urge any specific steps for bringing the Baltic states into line, but its ominous tone came as a shock to Soviet liberals. With Mikhail Gorbachev out of Moscow on vacation last week, many wondered if the virulent anti-Baltic onslaught was yet another maneuver by conservative forces to discredit the Soviet leader's political reforms...
...largely because he hoped to inveigle Stalin into joining him. And Hitler was himself so treacherous that he could not believe Stalin was not planning to betray him. Stalin intensified those suspicions by his own aggressiveness. On virtually the day the Germans occupied Paris, the Soviets seized the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. A few weeks after that, they demanded and got Rumania to give up its provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat to his access to Rumania's rich oil fields, but for the time being he was too preoccupied...