Word: estonians
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TELEVISION ACQUAINTANCE. Backstage squabbling at the Bolshoi: intrepid Estonian journalist Urmas Ott gets to the bottom of it during a revealing 90- minute interview with prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya...
...More than 300,000 comments and suggestions flooded in; as a result, 58 out of 117 proposed clauses in the package of constitutional amendments and election laws were modified. Leading the legal revolt was the Baltic republic of Estonia, where the push for political reform has gone the furthest. Estonians feared that the new system would strengthen the authority of the central government and hamper efforts to achieve greater regional autonomy. In an unprecedented challenge to Moscow, the Estonian parliament rejected the constitutional amendments last month and passed a declaration of "national sovereignty." Ethnic Russians, he said, wanted to know...
...change of signal came too late to prevent most of the session's 37 speakers from sniping at the Baltic state. While Estonian President Arnold Ruutel watched impassively from the dais, his republic was accused of "creating a hotbed of tensions." In his own presentation, Ruutel repeated demands that Estonians be allowed to decide what form of parliament they wanted. There should be no place in the new laws, said Ruutel, for "formalistic texts that do not take into account the specific differences and demands" of each region...
...July 1987, Crimean Tatars demanded the right to return to their homeland on the Black Sea, from which they were removed in 1944. Last February, Armenians and Azerbaijanis began to clash over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave south of the Caucasus. And last week in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, the local supreme soviet turned down constitutional amendments proposed by Moscow and voiced new demands for sovereignty. Two days later, the Lithuanian supreme soviet raised similar objections, but stopped short of constitutional rebellion. Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to protest the compromise vote...
...Russian-dominated leadership in Moscow can find small comfort in the fact that the Estonian itch for independence has not spread considerably farther -- yet. Under Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet nationality policy seemed to mean that national groups could organize the likes of folkloric song and dance companies, but that the major decisions affecting the welfare of national groups were made in Moscow. Bureaucratic centralization reached such absurd dimensions that, as a Lithuanian once complained, "Ivan Petrovich must rule on the opening times for toilets in towns with names he cannot even pronounce...