Word: baltics
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With these magnificent craft, the Norse searched far and wide for goods they couldn't get at home: silk, glass, sword-quality steel, raw silver and silver coins that they could melt down and rework. In return they offered furs, grindstones, Baltic amber, walrus ivory, walrus hides and iron...
...first, the Norse traded locally around the Baltic Sea. But from there, says Fitzhugh, "their network expanded to Europe and Britain, and then up the Russian rivers. They reached Rome, Baghdad, the Caspian Sea, probably Africa too. Buddhist artifacts from northern India have been found in a Swedish Viking grave, as has a charcoal brazier from the Middle East." The Hagia Sophia basilica in Istanbul has a Viking inscription in its floor. A Mycenaean lion in Venice is covered with runes of the Norse alphabet...
...edge of the Baltic Sea, just past the rusting hulks of the trawlers that crowd the port of Kaliningrad, sits a nondescript, seemingly abandoned factory. Inside, however, scores of mechanics are assembling classy sedans, while nearby, engineers in white lab coats huddle to discuss production levels with their Russian colleagues in German-inflected English. It's an incongruous setting for one of Europe's most prestigious automotive marques, the Bayerische Motorwerken, better known...
...next stage of expansion, the candidates will include Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, three former Soviet republics that border Russia itself. Russian officials from Boris Yeltsin on down swear they absolutely, positively will not tolerate Baltic membership in the Atlantic alliance. This stage, two or three years from now, could mean a return to some form of East-West cold war. And since nuclear weapons are the only way NATO could defend the Baltic states against a threat from Russia, it could also mean a return to the terrible days when thermonuclear missile forces confronted each other across European borders...
Walesa's life, like those of Gorbachev and the Pope, was shaped by communism. Born to a family of peasant farmers in 1943, he came as a young man to work in the vast shipyards that the communist state was developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of workers' protests in the 1970s and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age 37, to join...