Word: estonians
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Increasingly, Baltic leaders are hearing demands for "national rights." For some proponents the phrase means full sovereignty, now. For others it means autonomy within a radically more lenient U.S.S.R. Estonian officials are busily planning to introduce their own currency, airline and diplomatic missions abroad. The so-called popular fronts, with their platforms calling for regional self-determination, are well on their way to taking over the power structure. The secessionists and the federalists disagree about tactics and timetable, but not about the dream of independence...
...republics without aggrieving the large numbers of local Russians? In Estonia, where Russians and other minorities comprise 40% of the 1.7 million population, the Russians complain that personal snubs abound. Alexander Yashugin, a decorated World War II veteran who lives in a suburb of Tallinn, said an Estonian shopkeeper refused to let him register to buy a TV set, and would not even put him on a waiting list. "On the front, they didn't discriminate between Balt and Russian," he said...
...electoral law, Russians protest, will exclude 80,000 to 100,000 of them from voting in Estonia's first competitive elections in December. Another law makes it necessary for all people to speak Estonian (as different from Russian as Hungarian is from English) to get a job. Though Russians have four years to comply, they protest angrily that there are not enough teachers or textbooks available for all of them to learn...
Vabadus! Vabadus! Vabadus! With interlocking hands held high, Estonians joined together in lines four and six deep in Tallinn to chant a single word: "Freedom!" The invocation was echoed last week all along a human chain, formed by an estimated 2 million people, that stretched from the Estonian capital of Tallinn across Latvia and into neighboring Lithuania to end at Gediminas Tower in Vilnius, some 400 miles from the starting point...
...certain, though, that Estonia has lost the fight. The Presidium simply sent the electoral law back to the Estonian parliament for review. And in a semi-bow to Baltic sensibilities, Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev confirmed that the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pacts secretly assigned the three states to Moscow's sphere of influence on the eve of World War II. But he denied this had any bearing on the status of the republics, which Moscow annexed in 1940 as members of the U.S.S.R...