Word: crackdowns
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Soviet army garrison in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, a hotbed of tension between ethnic Russians and Lithuanians, sent soldiers toting submachine guns to patrol city streets and gave them authority to check documents and arrest civilians. This escalation gave weight to rumors that Moscow planned a military crackdown on the rebellious Baltic republics and prompted a protest from the Lithuanian government to Gorbachev that the actions of the Soviet army brutally violate the human rights of ((Lithuanian)) citizens...
While the left was splintering, the right was organizing to demand a law- and-order crackdown. Some 470 members of the Congress of People's Deputies, or just over a fifth of the total, belong to Soyuz (Union), a diverse grouping of military men, members of the powerful military-industrial complex and ethnic Russians living as minorities in various republics. As the Congress of People's Deputies meeting approached, Soyuz and conservatives generally seemed to be gaining influence with a frustrated Gorbachev. That should have been no surprise. The reformists' strength had always resided in an evanescent popular mood that...
During the fall, Moscow was awash with rumors that the rightists had talked Gorbachev into a crackdown. German Sovietologist Nerlich, who was in Moscow in November, heard a particularly unnerving -- and unconfirmed -- story. During a Politburo meeting on Nov. 16, an army-KGB-conservative bloc supposedly presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum that Nerlich summarizes this way: "Within six weeks he had to get things under control in the republics, Moscow and Leningrad or there would be physical ways of removing him." Janis Jurkans, foreign minister of the Latvian republic, tells a different story of a November ultimatum. He said last...
Both tendencies, toward anarchy and a crackdown, gathered speed as the People's Deputies met. Five republics in effect declined to participate: Lithuania and Armenia would not send official delegations; Latvians and Estonians attended only as observers; most of the delegates from Moldova (as the Moldavian republic now calls itself) walked out in a complicated dispute over the creation of independent ethnic states within that small republic...
...says Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, who helped liquidate the cold war, in a fiery resignation. And the hard right is in fact well organized, while democrats splinter. Worse, popular support seems to be swinging toward a crackdown. -- The U.S. deputy commander of American forces in the gulf says his troops won't be ready for war on Jan. 15 -- hardly the message Bush wants Saddam Hussein to hear. -- Is Germany fated to be haunted by revelations about former spies...