Word: lithuania
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...zone, and those who inhabit it view themselves as besieged defenders of the Soviet empire. In its unofficial role as armed protector of the republic's non-Lithuanian minorities, many of whom fear Baltic independence, the OMON unit has become a kind of partisan brigade determined to prevent Lithuania's secession at all costs. "We are drawn together by our attitude to the future of Lithuania and the Soviet Union," says Major Boleslav Makutinovich, commander of the unit. "When others talk to us of independence, we say people are only independent in the graveyard...
...country. The following year, it took on the task of policing large demonstrations, ostensibly to provide riot control. Today there are 35 OMON units in the U.S.S.R., representing a total force of about 10,000 men, all of them answering to local authorities. The exceptions are the units in Lithuania and Latvia, which are supposedly commanded directly by Moscow as well as by the Soviet Interior Ministry forces stationed in the Baltics...
...either disband or leave the republic. Dressed in fatigues and cradling automatic weapons, the Black Berets mocked the protesters. One of their own signs near the barbed wire separating the demonstration site from the OMON base read, THE SOVIET ARMY AND OMON: THE LAST DEFENDERS OF NATIONAL MINORITIES IN LITHUANIA...
...National Security Adviser and nominee to head the CIA, believe in the cyclical theory of Russian and Soviet history: every interlude of reform inevitably gives way to a resurgence of repression; the good Gorbachev of glasnost and democratization in '89 turns into the bad Gorbachev of Bloody Sunday in Lithuania last January. Others believe in a linear theory: the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the transformation of the internal order have passed the point of no return, the keepers of the Stalinist flame are on their last legs, it is too late for a rightist coup; therefore Gorbachev...
...international environment where economies are capitalist, trade is free, political life is democratic, security is collective, and some degree of sovereignty is pooled. Europe -- thanks to the Common Market, the Helsinki process and the march toward integration in 1993 -- is closer to that ideal than anywhere else. Hence Slovenia, Lithuania and the Ukraine have somewhere to go. And, crucially, their masters in Belgrade and Moscow have less to fear in letting them...