Word: riga
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first new ambassador on the scene was Denmark's Otto Borch, who said, "No assignment I have received has brought me greater pleasure than this one." Somehow the Latvians managed to find a handful of red-and-white Danish flags to wave as they cheered his arrival in Riga last week...
...Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, nationalists indignantly rejected the notion that they should play by the Kremlin's rigged rules. But in Moscow, Gorbachev's apparent willingness to accept even the idea of Baltic freedom further antagonized the hard-liners and set in motion the chain of events that led to last week's coup d'etat...
Pugo was a Latvian who had been the KGB chief in Riga in the early '80s. He knew that Gorbachev believed all nationalities in the U.S.S.R. should be united by Soviet patriotism. In his conversations with Gorbachev he evoked this sentiment repeatedly, in effect offering himself as an example of a good Balt as opposed to ungrateful, unreasonable troublemakers like Vytautas Landsbergis, the brave but reckless president of Lithuania...
...Soviet army paratroopers stormed the television tower in Vilnius in January, killing 15 unarmed civilian demonstrators, OMON has been waging a campaign of intimidation against the democratically elected leadership of the republic. The same is true in neighboring Latvia, where Black Berets raided the republic's interior ministry in Riga, leaving five people dead. In their zeal to enforce the Soviet constitution and the presidential decrees of Mikhail Gorbachev, OMON forces have subsequently carried out a series of surprise attacks, seizing buildings, ransacking customs posts and, on several occasions, shooting at people who got in their...
...formerly persecuted members of the nationalist Rukh (Movement) to founders of the new Party of Democratic Renaissance, from Ukrainian chauvinists to representatives of the ethnic Russians, who make up 20% of the population, the people I've met in Kiev seem every bit as determined as those in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to break with Moscow. If they succeed, their country would be one of the largest in Europe. However, their rhetoric is quieter and their strategy less confrontational than the Balts...