Word: vilnius
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nationalist upsurge in other parts of the Soviet Union has triggered a backlash in Russia, by far the largest and most populous of the country's republics. Tired of the slogan OCCUPIERS, GO HOME scrawled on walls from Vilnius to Baku, an increasingly vocal minority of ethnic Russians are demanding more respect and a better deal for their maligned republic. If anyone has suffered from 72 years of Communist rule, they say, it has been the Russians. They witnessed the desecration of their national shrines, the extermination of their brightest talents, and the economic and ecological rape of their resource...
Three days earlier, in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, a meeting of some of Gorbachev's much more determined opponents had added special urgency to his demand for expanded authority. As results of local elections flowed into the headquarters of Sajudis, the Lithuanian popular front, the architects of the independence movement gathered to take stock. The election for the republic's parliament had amounted to a referendum on secession from the Soviet Union. Backing a candidate in each district, Sajudis captured 72 of the 90 seats decided. "If this isn't a landslide, what is?" asked Algimantas Cekuolis, a Communist...
...touched down in Vilnius the dignified statesman, expecting to rely on his charm and diplomatic skills to work out a compromise. But when the first cry of Samostoyatelnost! -- independence -- sounded from the Lithuanian crowd, Mikhail Gorbachev rapidly abandoned the strategies of genteel diplomacy and adopted the tactics of a ward politician bent on maintaining his lock on a balking constituency. "Independence?" he shouted above the insistent cries. "Let's have it. At the workplace. In cities. Republics. But together...
...Vilnius fuel-machinery plant, he spied a sign in Russian reading not more rights but full independence. "Who gave you that?" Gorbachev challenged a Lithuanian welder. When the worker replied that he had made the sign, Gorbachev switched to a softer approach, commending the man on his grasp of Russian. But the worker would have none of Gorbachev's compliments. "You don't think we know how to write in Russian?" he challenged. "We can read and speak Russian too, while there are lots of Russians who can't speak a word of Lithuanian...
...Deputy from Lithuania: "We are the mirror image of South Korea and Singapore 30 years ago." But Lithuania depends on the rest of the Soviet Union for 90% of its raw materials and energy, which cost far more than the food and household products it turns out. Today Vilnius pays the equivalent of $6 per bbl. for oil delivered from Siberia; at world prices it would cost four times that. Lithuania is also a victim of the Soviet economy's "monopolism" -- the practice of turning a single factory into the sole supplier of a certain product for the entire country...