Word: baltics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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VILNIUS. While Russia was electing its first real President, the Baltic republics were going about their own democratic business. In Estonia, four anticommunist parties pushed for legislation to break up collective farms and convert them into private plots. In Latvia, parliamentarians vigorously debated emergency health care for local soldiers who helped clean up the Chernobyl disaster five years ago. In Lithuania, the Supreme Council passed a new social-welfare bill that will require raising taxes...
...They have already established their own border posts and invited Western economists to advise them on how to set up their own banks. They are trying to introduce their own systems of insurance and taxation as well as their own postage stamps and passports. Two weeks ago, the three Baltic governments called on the KGB to abolish its branch offices in the republics. Last week the three Presidents announced their intention to sign an international treaty curbing the spread of nuclear weapons. They were putting the Soviet Union on notice that it must someday remove its nukes from their territory...
...tried to head off. The U.S.S.R. is potentially a prosperous country, said Baker, but "to tap this potential, the Soviets must move to embrace a real market economy." And to provide stable political underpinning for it, Moscow should fully accept the rule of law, stop repressing the independence-minded Baltic states, cut its military spending and curtail or end its aid to "regimes that pursue internal repression," presumably including Cuba...
...accepts the borders of the U.S.S.R. that existed when the Roosevelt Administration recognized the Soviet government in 1933, 12 years after the de facto annexation of Georgia. The forcible incorporation of the Baltic republics came seven years later. Therefore the Bush Administration supports the Balts' claim to independence but considers the Georgian issue a domestic affair of the U.S.S.R...
...Baltic leaders have made progress in reassuring their own minorities, especially ethnic Russians, that they are entitled to full rights of citizenship. A revealing moment came during the central authorities' brutal but abortive crackdown in January. Not only did Kremlin agents fail to goad the Balts into armed resistance, which would have provided a pretext for more bloodshed, but local ethnic Russians also refused to form a pro-Moscow fifth column. Instead many sided with the secessionists...