Word: baltics
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...conventional-arms reductions and a demilitarized "corridor" in Europe to lessen the possibility of a surprise attack from either side. He was hardly placated when Moscow admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a mistake; he criticized the government for a colonialist attitude toward Armenia and the Baltic states. Though a supporter of Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much personal power. "There are no guarantees that a Stalinist will not succeed Gorbachev," he warned. The release of political prisoners motivated him to call...
...year is 1992. Gorbachev has been overthrown, and the Soviet empire has fallen apart. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals...
Gorbachev, who has called a multiparty system "rubbish," has good reason to worry. Many non-Russians in the Soviet empire -- Ukrainians and Azerbaijanis as well as Armenians and Balts -- would flock to new parties seeking autonomy from Moscow. The Baltic republics already sport popular fronts and other freshly minted political groups whose members ran as independent candidates in national elections earlier this year and trounced establishment party hacks. In the Russian Republic itself, there is mounting anger and frustration with empty shops and suffocating bureaucracy that could easily swell the rolls of a gaggle of independent parties. Politburo member Yegor...
...Honecker, along with other top party officials, lived a decidedly bourgeois life inside the walled luxury compound of Wandlitz, a few miles north of East Berlin. But last week it was revealed that he also had a $1.2 million vacation villa on the tiny island of Vilm in the Baltic Sea, previously thought to be an uninhabited bird preserve. Some of the perks claimed by East Germany's elite had a style reminiscent of ward pols in the U.S. Several Politburo members, for example, held the presumably undemanding post of "honorary member" of the Construction Ministry's "academy...
...change, the scale of change, and the drama of the change are all such that we have to stop thinking in conventional terms. Perhaps there will be a Soviet confederation of some sort, much looser than what there is now, with some new form of associated statehood for the Baltic republics. Georgia and some of the other more nationally defined republics could enjoy a much more independent status within the Soviet confederation. If they don't have that, then they will have to have some form of Great Russian nationalist dictatorship. I think Gorbachev is trying to persuade...