Word: moldavia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Riding atop the economic woes is the horseman of ethnic anarchy amid the 15 national republics that constitute the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan are nearly at war with each other, Moldavia has been crippled by ethnically inspired strikes, Georgians are demanding an end to the "Soviet empire," and in Lithuania the Communist Party has abolished its own monopoly of power, the most striking sign of Baltic nationalism to date...
Gorbachev did his star turn during a two-day Central Committee meeting in Moscow that was 18 months in the planning. It focused on the ominous wave of nationalism that refuses to ebb: resurgent independence movements in the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Moldavia; rioting and murder among rival ethnic groups in the southern republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, in which at least 232 people have been killed in the past 18 months...
Russians suffering discrimination in the Soviet Union? It sounds about as likely as the English becoming second-class citizens in parts of Great Britain. But that is how many of the 30 million Russians feel who live in the U.S.S.R.'s restive "ethnic republics" like Moldavia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In the throes of a quest for their own independence, nationalists in those areas are denouncing the Russians living among them as "occupiers" and "migrants." They are enacting voting laws that disenfranchise many Russians and are forcing them to learn the local languages...
...influence on the government to revise the laws," said factory worker Vladimir Shorikin. Igor Shepelevich, director of a computer-chip plant, explained that new strikes could pretty well close down Estonia. "The republic's railroads, airports, seaports and power systems are all run by Russians," he pointed out. In Moldavia recent strikes by Russians left tomatoes rotting in fields and railroad cars standing empty at stations, worsening the Soviet Union's food shortages...
...glasnost has sparked serious problems for Gorbachev, none more threatening than the release of long-festering resentments felt by various national and ethnic groups. The world's last polyglot empire now faces renewed demands from the Crimean Tatars about grievances that go back 45 years, nationalist demonstrations in Moldavia against Russification, secessionism along the Baltic coast and sectarian violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis...