Word: baltics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...place of the Soviet Union, there are 15 separate nations and something called the Commonwealth of Independent States, which provides a tenuous framework for cooperation among 11 of them. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have already reclaimed their status as separate competitors. Seven other former republics are not competing. But five states -- Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan -- will participate jointly at the Winter Games. Members of the so-called Unified Team wear the traditional red-white-and-light-gray uniforms of the former Soviet Union, but will be allowed to display the name, flag or symbol...
...city's scarcities became serious six months ago, say city officials, after the neighboring, newly independent Baltic states had already lifted their own price controls. That had led to an influx of entrepreneurial food buyers from those republics who took advantage of the cheaper prices to buy up Russian goods. At the same time, food supplies to the city from collective farms diminished after Mayor Anatoli Sobchak swept to power in elections in 1990. The bureaucracy, still predominantly hard-line communists, dragged their feet on implementing changes. While other Russian cities, including Moscow, could barter their industrial products for farm...
...defiant Yeltsin sent the same signal to the rest of the world and heightened pressure on President Bush to denounce the coup. Historians will debate how much impact this televised imagery had on the outcome. But it is noteworthy that a diplomat representing one of the newly independent Baltic republics jubilantly called people at CNN days later and thanked them for helping to give his country its freedom...
...Gorbachev's admirers in the West, George Bush supported him longest and most warmly. Only after the Soviet leader's resignation on Christmas Day did Bush acknowledge that 12 new countries (not counting the three Baltic states) and an 11-member Commonwealth of Independent States had been created on the soil of the former Soviet Union. He granted recognition to all 12 and announced that diplomatic relations would be opened immediately between the U.S. and Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Armenia. The other six -- Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- could expect diplomatic ties once they committed themselves...
Gorbachev also talked repeatedly about granting "sovereignty" to the union's republics, yet he never devised a form of qualified freedom that had any appeal for the nationalist forces rising in all of the republics. When the three Baltic states insisted on regaining their separate status, he was even willing to look the other way last January as security forces used tanks and guns to suppress the independence movements...