Word: gorbachevized
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...candidly told an ally that he had to act, or the West "will say we are either stupid or soft." But would he actually have done it if the West had not been divided and distracted by the Suez events? Or to put it another way, what did Mikhail Gorbachev last week consider to be the lessons of 1956, and how do they apply to the Baltic states' demands for independence...
...essential partner in such a future order, still seems to favor the feral approach. Knowing the world was looking somewhere else, its army stamped a bloody boot on separatist Lithuania -- a no-nonsense warning that the union of Soviet republics will not be allowed to splinter. President Mikhail Gorbachev's verbal shrug at the violence looked like a casual reactivation of the Brezhnev Doctrine -- in his own country...
Watchers could only wonder if the crackdown marked an ominous turning point for Gorbachev's commitment to liberalize his troubled nation. Has he chosen to sacrifice his promises of change to demands for order? He appeared to have decided that Soviet unity was worth any cost. The bloodletting in Vilnius was plainly intended to warn other restive republics to draw back from demands for sovereignty -- before the troops arrive there too. Some in the West were beginning to divine a different message: a betrayal of their investment in Gorbachev's leadership. Even his well-wishers fear Gorbachev has embarked...
...events in Lithuania should not have come as a real surprise. Ethnic separatism has always been Gorbachev's blind spot, a yearning for which the Soviet President has neither sympathy nor patience. Though he likes to claim he is simply "enforcing the constitution," he has been consistent in his efforts to neutralize democratically elected governments in republics that threaten to slip away from the Kremlin's control. While he has put up with considerable disorder, which dismays his generals, he has demonstrated before that he is ready to use armed force to hold the union together. Now Gorbachev has adopted...
That obfuscation was matched in Moscow, where no one wanted to take responsibility. Responding to questions from Supreme Soviet Deputies, Gorbachev implied that the killings in Vilnius were the Lithuanians' own fault. He accused them of violating the Soviet constitution, trampling the human rights of the republic's Russian and Polish minorities and splitting the society. Negotiations with Lithuania were hardly possible, he said, "when the republic is led by such people" as Landsbergis...