Word: slavically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...August, the country has been writhing in a last agony that, in the words of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, seemed to drag on "through some sort of sick eternity." Finally Yeltsin and the Presidents of Ukraine and Belorussia -- founding republics of the old union in 1922 and still its Slavic core -- decided to sign a death certificate: "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence...
...same time, the first blurry outlines of what might replace the old union began to take shape. The new commonwealth formed by the three Slavic republics would supposedly coordinate -- but not dictate -- the economic, military and foreign policies of its sovereign members. To dramatize the break from the communist -- and before that, Russian imperial -- past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth's coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk...
Another leader who was peeved by what he regarded as cavalier treatment by the commonwealth founders was Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan. When the agreement was signed he was in the air, en route to Moscow for a scheduled meeting with Gorbachev and the three Slavic presidents that never came off; Yeltsin phoned him at Vnukovo airport shortly after his plane landed to tell him about the agreement. Nazarbayev darkly suspected that the Slavic leaders were aiming at a "medieval" division of the union along religious- ethnic-cultural lines and talked for awhile of siding with Gorbachev to keep...
...armored personnel carriers and 155-mm howitzers set out from Belgrade to assault Croatia's eastern wing, which borders on Serbia. In another action, two columns of federal reservists marched into Bosnia-Herzegovina, shattering the tense calm of that buffer state with its explosive mixture of Serbs, Croatians and Slavic Muslims. When an oil refinery blew up under attack in Osijek, Croatia's key city in the east, it became clear that a region long dormant had loosed a volcano of passions...
...thinkers believe that an avowedly communist dictatorship can be re- established. Popular hatred of the last one runs too deep. But many do fear an alliance of former communist apparatchiks with Slavic nationalists who reject parliamentary democracy as un-Russian...