Word: vilnius
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...VILNIUS. While Russia was electing its first real President, the Baltic republics were going about their own democratic business. In Estonia, four anticommunist parties pushed for legislation to break up collective farms and convert them into private plots. In Latvia, parliamentarians vigorously debated emergency health care for local soldiers who helped clean up the Chernobyl disaster five years ago. In Lithuania, the Supreme Council passed a new social-welfare bill that will require raising taxes...
...should agree to remain there until the Kurds feel safe. Germany and Japan should play a role, if only a financial one. British forces, particularly, should stay behind. It was Prime Minister John Major who first drew a distinction between observing a studied neutrality as between, say, Moscow and Vilnius, and seeing to it that Saddam is prohibited from murdering millions of his own citizens...
...Lithuania, is often cited as proof that Gorbachev has already thrown in with the ultraconservatives. Actually, in the aftermath of the massacre, he showed his determination to preserve an equilibrium between right and left, between centrifugal and centripetal forces. If the hard-liners had really had their way in Vilnius, the night of horror would have stretched into a week, a month, perhaps a new era. Vytautas Landsbergis would now be dead, in jail or, if he were extremely lucky, back to teaching music. Instead he remains President of Lithuania...
...affect events inside the U.S.S.R. "The Soviets are sensitive to what is being said abroad," says a French official. "But frankly, we can't hope that what we do will cause Moscow to change its behavior." Moreover, some analysts advise that punishing Gorbachev for the blood spilled in Vilnius and Riga by withdrawing Western aid might undercut him and strengthen Soviet hard-liners. A U.S. official points out that almost all the aid Washington has pledged "will benefit the reformers and not the reactionaries...
...into the bushes." So it seemed until last week, when people by the tens of thousands reappeared on the streets of Moscow, Leningrad and other cities to protest military intervention in the Baltics. No event since the advent of perestroika has so polarized Soviet society as the bloodshed in Vilnius. It has widened the chasm between reformers and reactionaries, leaving almost no support for the centrist positions that Gorbachev claims to represent...