Word: lithuania
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...democratic forces in the country pointed out, the dispatch of paratroops to Lithuania last month was first justified in the same way -- as a limited move against draft dodgers. Yet it quickly turned into a bloody assault against pro-independence demonstrators that claimed the lives of 14 people...
Mistrust of the security forces runs high -- with good reason. According to Colonel Victor Alksnis, a spokesman for disenchanted reactionaries, the pro- Communist National Salvation Committee in Lithuania was prepared to seize power and expected Gorbachev to pave the way by imposing presidential rule. But Gorbachev did not act, leading Alksnis to conclude that "the President betrayed...
...attack in Riga came only seven days after army paratroops had seized Lithuania's television center in Vilnius, killing 15 unarmed demonstrators. There too the republican parliament has been turned into a fortress, with a 10-ft.-high concrete wall in front and a deep antitank ditch along one side. Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis has been holed up in the parliament building since the current crisis began in mid-January...
...disputes which side has more muscle. The deployment of paratroops in Lithuania and black berets in Latvia has shown the range of powers at the command of what former presidential adviser Stanislav Shatalin calls the "black colonels" now surrounding Gorbachev. This is a reference to a conservative clique of officers in the Soviet parliament who opposed Shevardnadze. Their growing influence has been reflected in fiddling with weapons limits in defiance of the Conventional Arms Agreement signed in Paris last year, and in an increasingly obstinate stance on the timetable for Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe. The major obstacle...
...broad coalition of reformers has been in the making since last October, when the Democratic Russia movement was founded to unify a host of squabbling parties that sprang up after the Communists lost their monopoly on power. The anti-Gorbachev demonstrations that followed the crackdown in Lithuania have begun to mold the diffuse movement into a serious force capable of winning over the liberal fence straddlers, who had stuck by the Soviet President as the last bulwark against the reactionaries. The mass defection of prominent politicians, economists, writers, artists, actors and scientists from the Gorbachev camp in the last...