Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MOSCOW--Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze says the Soviet Union is willing to negotiate an end to the NATO and Warsaw Pact military alliances and plans to eliminate its own overseas bases by the year...
...promised that as East bloc countries move away from one-party Communist rule, the Soviet Union will observe strict principles of non-intervention and "absolute freedom of choice...
...mostly Christian Armenia, nationalists are also gaining new prominence. Communist Party leader Suren Arutunyan, who jailed many extremists last December following demonstrations in the capital of Yerevan, has ordered most of them released. Says Khachik Stamboltsyan, a member of the Armenian supreme soviet who spent six months in confinement: "Relations are still tense between us, but we talk a lot." Expressions of hatred toward Azerbaijan are the rule. "They had an earthquake in Baku recently," recounts an Armenian girl. "Too bad it didn't hit 20 on the Richter scale and wipe them...
Added to ethnic grievances in Armenia is the railway blockade, which began + two months ago when Azerbaijanis stopped allowing freight cars through railyards in Nakhichevan. The facility handles 85% of goods bound for Armenia from other Soviet republics, giving the Azerbaijanis a virtual stranglehold. The cutoff has not affected food supplies, many of which are home grown, and markets in Yerevan last week were stocked with fruits and vegetables. But fuel supplies were virtually nonexistent. Car owners waited in lines at the city's gas stations for days at a time. There were also acute shortages of many building supplies...
...That is unlikely to happen, but such is the depth of bitterness that civil war would be hard to prevent if it did. Azerbaijani nationalists also speak seriously of carrying out their self-proclaimed secession if Moscow continues to govern Nagorno-Karabakh. "There would be a war ((with the Soviet Union))," says Huseynov with a shrug. "But we think Iran and Turkey would help us." Moscow would presumably have something of its own to say about any attempt by Baku to exercise such an option. But so far, Moscow has managed only to alienate both sides in the bitter feud...