Word: lithuania
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...months Gorbachev has sat back calmly and allowed the disintegration of the Communists' monopoly on power in Eastern Europe. Now, when one of his own republics was demanding the same opportunity for democratic self-rule, Gorbachev was far less relaxed about it. There could be no pretending that Lithuania's demands to secede from the union were an isolated appeal. If the nation is divided over issues of language, culture, politics and religion, it is united in its dissatisfaction with economic problems. As goes Lithuania, so might go other republics -- thus inviting a military crackdown and destroying perestroika. "If even...
LATVIA. Following the lead of Lithuania, Latvian lawmakers amended the constitution to create a multiparty system...
...problems confronting Moscow, however, the challenge for independence mounted by Lithuania threatened to have the most serious consequences. Nothing less than the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union, and possibly the survival of its leader, seemed to be at stake. The stage was set on Dec. 20, when Lithuania's Communist Party declared independence from its national counterpart. At the time, Gorbachev angrily told a group of Lithuanian parliamentarians that they had "stabbed perestroika in the heart." But Gorbachev knew that the party's maneuver was merely a dress rehearsal for the day when the republic would try to secede...
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...
Soviet officials have given a virtual guarantee they will not use force to keep Lithuania and its 3.7 million residents in the Soviet Union. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Gennady I. Gerasimov told the BBC last week the Kremlin has "only one tool" for preventing a breakup of the union...