Word: sovietizers
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...textiles to farm machinery - now heads to markets in the West. Tourism is booming, too: last year, ferries, cruise ships and low-cost airlines disgorged 1.5 million visitors in Riga, up from 1.1 million the previous year. Visvaldis Lacis, an 83-year-old author and parliamentarian, recalls that under Soviet rule the kgb stopped every ship entering and leaving the harbor to check for spies and stowaways. Lacis now watches as a black and red Cypriot-flagged container ship slides by on its way to the sea. "This," he marvels, "is freedom...
...early 1990s, only 1,000 ships entered the port each year; now more than 3,600 do so. Hermanis Cernovs, a naturalized Latvian born in Russia, has witnessed the transformation at first hand. When the Iron Curtain fell, he was commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine. Today, he organizes joint sea-rescue exercises with France, Sweden and the U.S. as the head of the Latvian coast guard. "The changes of the past decade were very, very fast," he says in English, the region's new lingua franca. "They were completely unexpected...
That pattern has repeated itself throughout Eastern Europe. As the Soviet Union melted away, newly unfettered countries were primed and hungry for economic growth. Back in 1994, for example, Estonia became one of the world's first regimes with a flat tax on corporate and personal income. These young democracies also benefited from advantages shared by the region as a whole, including enviable political stability, social cohesion and a sound regulatory environment. Equally key, they boasted high levels of education and innovation, giving rise to outfits like the Internet telephone company Skype, which was founded by a Dane...
...first contact with the outside world after his country gained independence from Moscow in 1991 was with Finns and Swedes. They were ready to offer young bankers, new to capitalism, advice on how to organize such things as international payments. "Here were these tiny nations splitting off from the Soviet Union and we needed help," says Raasuke. Later, he adds, his bank needed equity following the Russian ruble crisis of 1998: "Who do you go to? You go to your best friends. The ones you've been talking to all along...
Dingell is bulletproof in this area. "I do not propose that my country be the only country that pays the costs of addressing [global warming]," he said. "China is only an example. You've got India, you've got the former Soviet countries, you've got the Europeans. Everybody is trying to give fine speeches, get a lot of credit--and then stick somebody else with the bill...