Word: sovereigns
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...measure of how quickly political change has been sweeping through the Baltic republics that the debate about national self-determination has moved from the streets into Communist Party headquarters. Asked about the future, Valjas replies, "Our ideal is an independent, sovereign Estonia within the Soviet Union or within a federation of sovereign republics." Latvian Ideology Secretary Ivars Kezbers muses about being a "free republic in a free Soviet Union." Lithuanian Second Secretary Vladimir Berezov says that "our common goal is independence, even if the ways of getting there are different...
Still, the Baltic states hope at least to cut a better deal with Moscow, perhaps in a new treaty that guarantees their sovereign rights. During five decades of Soviet rule, the three republics have watched helplessly as all- powerful ministries in Moscow imposed new industries, regardless of whether they were appropriate to the region. As a result, stretches of white sand beaches along the Baltic coast became too polluted for swimming. An influx of outside manpower threatened to make Latvians a minority in their own homeland. The hardworking Estonians learned to their amazement that by Gorbachev's reckoning, they were...
That could be limited to the party's suggestion of expanded powers for republics. But it opens the possibility that radicals could push through radical change such as Andrei D. Sakharov's suggested loose confederation of sovereign states, or even the breakup of the union into independent states...
...treaty created the U.S.S.R. as a union of allegedly sovereign republics which were in reality dominated by the Kremlin in Moscow...
Estonian activists originally suggested rewriting the treaty of union in November, when they made world headlines by becoming the first of the Baltics to declare their republic "sovereign" within the framework of the Soviet Union...