Word: baltics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...mines of the Saar. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires would be chopped up into a goulash of new nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A newly independent Poland acquired parts of the German industrial area of Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, providing it with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Germany alone would be disarmed, forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or have any major warships, submarines, warplanes or tanks. Germany would have to admit formally to being guilty of aggression and pay all war damages, a sum estimated at more than $100 billion (around $600 billion...
Adolf Hitler left Berlin that same night to survey his armies' progress in Poland, and what he saw pleased him mightily. General Heinz Guderian, the tank commander who had already swept across the 50-mile-wide Polish Corridor, the once German area linking Poland to the Baltic Sea, took the Fuhrer on a tour of the newly conquered territory. Hitler was amazed at the low number of ! German casualties, only 150 killed and 700 wounded among four divisions; his own regiment had suffered 2,000 casualties during its first day of combat in World War I. And he was impressed...
Estonia, one of the restive Baltic republics where perestroika and glasnost have spawned independence movements, was rebuked by the highest level of government last week. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet said Estonia violated the Soviet constitution by imposing a two-year residence requirement on voters in local elections. Estonia's Russian minority called the act discriminatory, and 40,000 Russian workers went on strike...
...certain, though, that Estonia has lost the fight. The Presidium simply sent the electoral law back to the Estonian parliament for review. And in a semi-bow to Baltic sensibilities, Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev confirmed that the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pacts secretly assigned the three states to Moscow's sphere of influence on the eve of World War II. But he denied this had any bearing on the status of the republics, which Moscow annexed in 1940 as members of the U.S.S.R...