Word: baltics
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...late for that. The incredible has become the inevitable. The Baltic states are gone; Ukraine and several other republics are going, and there is probably no stopping them. What one of Gorbachev's advisers, Yevgeni Primakov, calls a "unified economic space" is a lost cause, at least during the coming phase. The U.S.S.R. is, and always has been, a unified economic disaster area, and that, not ethnicity, is the main reason so many of those 280 million people want out. The U.S.S.R. has to go much further in falling apart before the pieces will have the incentive to reconstitute themselves...
Germany celebrated the first anniversary of unification last week, but the day will be remembered more for the fires that burned across the country than for the holiday fireworks. On the Baltic island of Rugen, right-wing extremists razed a center for asylum seekers. In the northern city of Bremen, a hostel for foreigners was firebombed. Shelters were also torched in Karlsruhe in the southwest and in Dusseldorf in the northwest, where two Lebanese children were severely burned. Altogether there were at least 16 attacks on foreigners within a 24-hour span, rounding off a three-week reign of terror...
That is a lesson soon forgotten when you can see the boatloads of VCRs and Doritos waiting off the Baltic Coast...
...counterforce they would exert against the centrifugal strains unleashed by the Big Bang of the failed coup. As it was, the first act of the State Council, a body made up of Gorbachev and the top officials of 10 republics, was to grant independence to the three Baltic republics. The move, which a mere month ago would have dazzled the world, last week seemed belated and inevitable, coming four days after the U.S. had extended formal recognition to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and scores of other nations had already done the same...
While officials in Moscow do not dispute the fact that the Baltics are out of the Soviet Union -- and Russia's Boris Yeltsin has recognized them -- Gorbachev still insists the final terms of their departure must be negotiated. Baltic leaders even share that view to some extent, if only to ensure a process that frees their republics from the grip of the more than 100,000 Soviet military, KGB and Interior Ministry troops still based there...