Word: lithuania
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...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...
...iron fist remained poised last week over all three Baltic republics, which have asserted their independence from the U.S.S.R. Army paratroops in Vilnius openly threatened the Lithuanian government. Predicted President Vytautas Landsbergis, who was holed up in the barricaded parliament building awaiting the next move: "The legitimate powers in Lithuania and Latvia will be overthrown...
...Riga, capital of Latvia, ethnic Russians staged pro-Moscow demonstrations and Soviet troops raided the police academy, carrying away its weapons. As in Lithuania the week before, party loyalists put together a shadowy, no-names- please committee of "national salvation" to call for presidential rule from Moscow. Communist Party organizers brought thousands into the streets of Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to demand the resignation of the elected government...
...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...
...later, Gorbachev told the parliament that "thousands of telegrams" had arrived at the Kremlin, along with appeals from the Committee of National Salvation, demanding presidential rule be imposed in Lithuania to halt the restoration of "a bourgeois state." He even waved a document, allegedly found by the KGB in a Lithuanian government building, which he said was a list of Communists and anti-independence leaders marked for detention...