Word: gorbachevized
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This is the same gentleman who brought us, ten years ago, the meaningful "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" and the bottom line "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall...
...attributed to a desire to quell the discontent of ethnic Rumanians in the Soviet republic of Moldavia, a region Stalin annexed from Rumania in 1940. Now that Ceausescu is gone, the Kremlin has every reason to expect that secessionist fervor will be rekindled. Evidently Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev hopes Bucharest can be bribed not to fan the flames -- proof, if any were needed, that the road to reconstruction may take some highly unpredictable turns...
This latest sign of fragmentation in Mikhail Gorbachev's multi-ethnic empire comes just as he is trying to defuse the growing threat of secession by the three Baltic republics. Lithuania's Communist Party has already declared its independence from Moscow headquarters, and the Estonian and Latvian organizations are considering similar moves toward local autonomy. Gorbachev plans to visit the area this week in search of compromise. Now he must look southward as well, to festering nationality problems in Azerbaijan -- and the long-feared spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into the six predominantly Muslim republics of the U.S.S.R...
Azerbaijan is turning into a permanent crisis for Gorbachev. There have been two years of something approaching civil war over the republic's mostly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where more than 120 people have been killed. In Baku, Azerbaijani gangs have systematically terrorized Armenians. Violence has also broken out in the southwestern city of Jalilabad, where two weeks ago mobs took over the local Communist Party headquarters and police station, and are threatening to elect their own leaders...
Officials in Moscow conceded last week that the domestic pressures on Gorbachev have become so intense that he will devote the rest of January almost exclusively to them, cutting back on his normally hectic schedule of meetings with foreign visitors. Given the complexity of his problems at home, Gorbachev is likely to find Feb. 1 arriving sooner than he would like...