Word: czarists
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...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...
...queens traditionally exacted loyalty to themselves as representatives of a royal family, not embodiments of an ethnic or cultural type. Czardom was rough on some minorities, notably Jews and Muslims. But it was surprisingly tolerant of most of the non-Russians who made up its quilt of an empire. Czarist indulgence extended even to the Mennonites, German-speaking Protestant pacifists, the boat people of 18th century Europe, whom hardly any other country would tolerate. As long as the Mennonites in Russia kept to themselves, the Romanovs didn't care how they spoke or prayed...
...still control many localities and would otherwise block any changes. More generally, his supporters contend that Yeltsin, faced with the surviving party apparatus and a divided, if not splintered, parliament, must in effect initiate reforms by decree. But to opponents the * dispatch of the namestniki smacks of an old czarist practice. The parliament consequently wants them replaced by locally elected administrators; Yeltsin fears that many of those elected will be Communists, who are better organized than the democrats. Parliament refuses to postpone local elections, Yeltsin has vetoed its election bill, and no one knows what will result...
...control of most ministries. To quiet the republic's balking minorities -- Armenians, Abkhasians and Kurds, as well as the increasingly restless Ossetians and Adzharis -- he has suggested that qualification for Georgian citizenship should be based on family lines that trace back to 1801, the year Georgia became part of czarist Russia. He has even stated that mixed marriages threaten the purity of the Georgian race...
...after 74 years of communist dictatorship and, centuries before that, of czarist autocracy, the Russians may get a government they have earned -- a democracy. For the first time, they did not subside into an acceptance of overlords. Instead they turned last week's reactionary coup into a transforming rite of passage, an epochal event that forced even Gorbachev to re-examine his most basic beliefs and resign his post as head of the Communist Party...