Word: better
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...think I was pretty human before I was divorced. Mine was not a terribly painful, miserable, rotten divorce with animosity and anxiety. I just knew that my life was going to have to change, and I was determined that I was going to make it better. The divorce was going to improve my life...
Sitting in his spacious, wood-paneled office in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, Communist Party leader Vaino Valjas, 58, wryly sums up the situation in his tiny Baltic republic with a peasant proverb: Better to see once than to hear a hundred times. The former Soviet Ambassador to Nicaragua was called home only a year ago to take up his new post, but what Valjas has already witnessed in those tumultuous twelve months is nothing less than a revolution, from the birth of unofficial political movements like the Estonian Popular Front to the bruising constitutional crisis with Moscow over...
...pressing the Kremlin to go further with economic reforms. Moscow officials have opposed the idea of independent national currencies, but that has not stopped the three republics from drafting plans to reduce the flood of Soviets who come from the rest of the country to buy scarce goods in better-supplied Baltic shops. The Estonians discuss establishing their own credit-card system, and the Latvians talk about creating an alternative currency as early as next January. It would be paid to local workers and redeemable in special stores. Last month the Supreme Soviet finally gave Estonia and Lithuania the green...
Still, the Baltic states hope at least to cut a better deal with Moscow, perhaps in a new treaty that guarantees their sovereign rights. During five decades of Soviet rule, the three republics have watched helplessly as all- powerful ministries in Moscow imposed new industries, regardless of whether they were appropriate to the region. As a result, stretches of white sand beaches along the Baltic coast became too polluted for swimming. An influx of outside manpower threatened to make Latvians a minority in their own homeland. The hardworking Estonians learned to their amazement that by Gorbachev's reckoning, they were...
...Gorbachev responds wisely and generously to the nationalistic stirrings in the Baltics, he will win on two fronts: the cause of perestroika throughout the Soviet Union will be advanced, and one more irritant in East-West relations will disappear. Living next door to good neighbors is always better in the long run than sharing a home with unhappy relatives...