Word: sovereigns
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...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...
...that end, Yeltsin took advantage of an already scheduled trip to Belorussia to sign a trade agreement and invited Kravchuk to join the discussions at the forest dacha. According to their aides, the three initially tried to revive a Gorbachev idea to form a fairly loose Union of Sovereign States that would still have a central government of sorts. But all day Saturday, says Russian Deputy Prime Minister Gennadi Burbulis, they kept hitting "a dead end." Finally the leaders instructed their foreign ministers to start over from scratch and draft something new. Working separately through the night, the ministers produced...
...Founders of the commonwealth agreed that those were real dangers, but described their association as a "last chance" to avert them. Gorbachev tried to convene the Congress of People's Deputies, the national legislature, to work out some kind of compromise between the new commonwealth and his Union of Sovereign States, but was blocked when legislators from the commonwealth republics refused to attend. The Soviet President huddled with army commanders to appeal for military support a day before Yeltsin made a comparable pitch to a similar group of officers. Some generals interviewed on British television found Yeltsin more impressive...
...task will not wait. The Dec. 1 referendum in which Ukrainians voted 9 to 1 to make their country a fully sovereign, independent nation -- and in effect proclaimed the old Soviet Union dead -- is bringing the problem to a head. In the wake of the vote, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoli Zlenko is reportedly proposing that the four nuclear republics set up a joint command over "the Soviet nuclear force" -- which might imply cutting Gorbachev out of the action entirely. It would also leave 1,300 tactical warheads in the hands of the other eight republics...
RACHMANINOFF, 24 PRELUDES (Arabesque Recordings). Though usually performed in small groupings or as encores, these two dozen pieces -- covering each of the major and minor keys -- become sovereign microworlds in the hands of piano virtuoso Ian Hobson...