Word: estonians
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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...
...Estonian activists originally suggested rewriting the treaty of union in November, when they made world headlines by becoming the first of the Baltics to declare their republic "sovereign" within the framework of the Soviet Union...
...party's call for a new law banning "nationalist and chauvinist organizations" could be targeted at pro-secession groups such as the Party of National Independence in Georgia, Russian strikers protesting a new language law in Estonia, or the mass-membership Estonian Popular Front, which supported the language...
...told, the lacerating rough-and-tumble debate set important precedents for a nation learning the ground rules of democracy. "The major achievement," said Estonian Deputy Siim Kallas, "has been showing the people that Deputies can pose questions to the higher authorities." More important, of course, are the answers. A Moscow woman told the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, "In other countries, if people express dissatisfaction with their government, it steps down. What about ours?" A Moscow worker offered an equally blunt assessment: "I like the way they are letting off steam, but we're not better fed because...
...wore on. Leonid Sukhov, a driver from Kharkov, stunned the assemblage by comparing Gorbachev "to the great Napoleon, who fearing neither bullets nor death, led the nation to victory, but owing to sycophants and his wife, transformed the republic into an empire." Marju Lauristin, a prominent Estonian nationalist, asked who in the ruling Politburo "knew in advance that troops would be used in Tbilisi." Others complained about Gorbachev's failure to improve his people's standard of living and mentioned rumors that he is building a fancy dacha for himself on the Black Sea in Crimea. Even...