Word: commonwealth
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...need your help now. Immediately. Stop hesitating or we will all have to pay a greater price in the end. You should promote reform in the commonwealth and, first of all, in Russia. They need urgent help in the form of hard currency to provide consumer goods for the market and speed up the move toward a convertible ruble. They want to move faster, but they cannot do so without a stabilizing fund of several billion dollars. If you have given aid to Poland and Hungary, Russia certainly deserves...
That announcement, along with the formation of a new, inelegantly named Commonwealth of Independent States, came as a stunning surprise but hardly a shock. The power had long been leaching out of the central authority in the Kremlin, and it was the leaders of the key republics that everyone looked to for salvation. The fear was that they would prove too determinedly nationalistic to come together in any kind of practical alliance. Yet Yeltsin and company came up with a proposal that all the independent republics could embrace -- if they wanted...
...same time, the first blurry outlines of what might replace the old union began to take shape. The new commonwealth formed by the three Slavic republics would supposedly coordinate -- but not dictate -- the economic, military and foreign policies of its sovereign members. To dramatize the break from the communist -- and before that, Russian imperial -- past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth's coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk...
After months of a headlong plunge toward dissolution, anarchy and possibly even civil war, the formation of the commonwealth marked the first hopeful step toward a new cohesion. As such, it swiftly began gaining additional members. On Friday Kazakhstan and the four Central Asian republics swallowed their annoyance at not being present at the creation, as well as their fears of becoming economic and cultural poor relations in a Slav-dominated family, and decided to join, provided they are given the status of co-founders. Their move brought together, however loosely, republics with 90% of the old union's people...
Which does not by any means ensure that the commonwealth will prevail, or even get itself truly organized. Its founding charter is not much more than a vaguely worded statement of intent. Its members must now actually define the policies they will pursue and form mechanisms to ensure that they really are coordinated. The alliance -- it is not really a state -- was not even a week old before its first potentially serious fissure appeared. While Yeltsin assured Soviet military leaders that the armed forces would remain under unified command, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk proclaimed that all army units...