Word: commonwealths
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Worse still, the commonwealth's efforts to unify economic policy are in a desperate race with the forces of hunger, cold and scarcity. So far, scarcity is winning. Severe shortages of fuel closed half the country's airports and halted domestic flights. Banks were running out of hard currency as citizens struggled with a runaway ruble. Factories called stoppages, services inexplicably ceased. Food was critically short in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukraine and Belorussia got Yeltsin to postpone until Jan. 2 a decree freeing many Russian prices, which was supposed to take effect Monday. The delay only touched...
Some help is on the way. Secretary of State James Baker,taking care not to side with either the dying union or the commonwealth aborning, announced that U.S. Air Force planes will begin flying food into Moscow, St. Petersburg and other hungry cities, using military rations left over from the Persian Gulf war. He also proposed that all nations interested in sending aid to the old U.S.S.R. hold a conference in early January to coordinate who would put up how much. But a senior British diplomat grumbled that the conference "should have been held three months...
...commonwealth has managed to stave off, at least for the moment, the threat of an outright economic war between the sundering union's republics. That prospect played no small part in pushing the commonwealth's founders together. When Yeltsin, Kravchuk, Belorussian leader Stanislav Shushkevich and some aides gathered at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha dacha, a forest retreat outside the city of Brest, on Saturday, Dec. 7, they appeared to have no intention of declaring the old union dead and founding a new association. But they quickly found they could not come to any other agreement -- and agreement was imperative...
Gorbachev fought desperately to hang on. He called the agreement unconstitutional and warned of anarchy, potential civil wars and fascist takeovers if the union fell apart. Founders of the commonwealth agreed that those were real dangers, but described their association as a "last chance" to avert them. Gorbachev tried to convene the Congress of People's Deputies, the national legislature, to work out some kind of compromise between the new commonwealth and his Union of Sovereign States, but was blocked when legislators from the commonwealth republics refused to attend. The Soviet President huddled with army commanders to appeal for military...
Another leader who was peeved by what he regarded as cavalier treatment by the commonwealth founders was Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan. When the agreement was signed he was in the air, en route to Moscow for a scheduled meeting with Gorbachev and the three Slavic presidents that never came off; Yeltsin phoned him at Vnukovo airport shortly after his plane landed to tell him about the agreement. Nazarbayev darkly suspected that the Slavic leaders were aiming at a "medieval" division of the union along religious- ethnic-cultural lines and talked for awhile of siding with Gorbachev to keep...