Word: belarus
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Such offers were bound to strike a chord in Belarus, a country suffering from 500% inflation, whose national currency, adorned with the image of a hare, is derisively referred to as the "bunny rabbit." Says Moscow economist Stanislav Zhukov: "The Belarussian economy is so unreformed, it has nowhere to go. It continues to produce goods that are so bad that even Russians don't want them...
Such statements are disturbingly compatible with the views of imperialists in Russia, who are bent on restoring Moscow's control over the former Soviet empire. "The borders of the U.S.S.R. will be restored peacefully," Russia's firebrand politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky recently told TIME. "Ukraine and Belarus will be the first to rejoin Russia. Tajikistan, Armenia and Abkhazia are begging to be taken back as Russian provinces. As for the Baltics, they are welcome to their independence -- if they have sufficient resources to sustain it after we cut short all energy supplies. Sure, they'll be independent, but they'll fall...
Russian neoimperialists like Zhirinovsky will be making a major mistake, however, if they try to project the election returns from Ukraine and Belarus onto all the former Soviet republics. The picture is far too complicated for that. Despite their economic problems, many republics continue -- with good reason -- to fear ethnic and military interference from their former Russian masters. Some, like Uzbekistan, have established authoritarian governments and are no longer willing to cede control back to Moscow. Other states, such as Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Moldova, view the large minority of ethnic Russians living in their midst as a fifth-column...
...nostalgia for the old empire: Once the people in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus experienced crisis and hardships, they started to have doubts about whether they needed independence at all. The more hardships crop up on the way of reform, the more ground Bolshevik forces gain. A major danger for us in Uzbekistan is the possible re-emergence of the Communist Party. We are going through the same crisis that everybody else is, but our people have not attained the level of political sophistication of Europe or even of Russia. Should a Bolshevik show up at a street corner again...
...Another in Belarus...