Word: local
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nationalists has provoked the ire of hard-liners in the Soviet leadership. In a harsh blast read over national television, the Communist Party Central Committee denounced the protests as an attempt "to incite the peoples of the Baltic republics to secede from the Soviet Union." The Central Committee criticized local party leaders for "playing up to nationalist sentiments," and called for "resolute, urgent measures to cleanse the Baltic republics of extremism and destructive and harmful tendencies...
Blitzkrieg and deception. In disputed Danzig, the once German port administered by the League of Nations since the end of World War I, the attack had begun half an hour before the invasion, when local Nazi Storm Troopers seized several key buildings and intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where 51 postal workers barricaded the doors...
...Sept. 6, Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, the supposed strongman who had insisted on Poland's forward strategy, evacuated his military headquarters from Warsaw and kept retreating until he crossed into Rumania. After Sept. 16, no further general orders went out from either the marshal or his headquarters. Local units maintaining pockets of resistance throughout Poland -- about 250,000 men in all -- were simply left on their own, to fight on as best they could...
...August that he planned to send SS units to Poland "to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish race or language." That was an exaggeration, but not by much. In town after town, Einsatzgruppen (special units) began roaming from house to house, systematically murdering local officials, teachers, doctors, aristocrats, Jews, clergymen, anyone who might oppose the New Order. SS officials in Berlin boasted of 200 shootings a day, but behind that curtain of silence, in obscure villages with names like Treblinka and Auschwitz, the killing over the next few years would increase to a level...
Estonia, one of the restive Baltic republics where perestroika and glasnost have spawned independence movements, was rebuked by the highest level of government last week. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet said Estonia violated the Soviet constitution by imposing a two-year residence requirement on voters in local elections. Estonia's Russian minority called the act discriminatory, and 40,000 Russian workers went on strike...