Word: baltics
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...running out for them. Party hard-liners have been defeated in almost every major election that has been held during the past two years. While communist rule goes unchallenged in the conservative Central Asian republics, the party is virtually a marginal opposition group in Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic republics. Rank-and-file members across the country are deserting the fold in droves. Some 4 million have left the party during the past 18 months, reducing total membership to 15 million...
What worries many is that the spectacle of violent disintegration in one multi-ethnic federation may increase the pressure for separatism in other amalgams, like Czechoslovakia, as well as the Soviet Union's Baltic republics. That is one reason Moscow last week backed "the unity and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia...
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...
...bloody Sundays in January, when Black Beret special forces and other Soviet units killed at least 18 people in Vilnius and Riga. Last Friday, Black Berets burned a Lithuanian customs post on the Latvian border and severely beat an unarmed guard. The entrances to official buildings throughout the Baltics are barricaded with concrete slabs, some decorated with patriotic murals. Now Moscow is threatening to impose economic sanctions on any republic that secedes, and the general staff of the armed forces is insisting that the Baltic governments pay "financial compensation" for any of their citizens who resist the draft...