Word: tbilisi
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...whom he commands from Moscow. Shouts lead to shots, and a riot becomes an enactment of Gorbachev's greatest dilemma: the relaxation of control can also mean disorder, which in turn can provoke repression, reversing reform and jeopardizing the political survival of the reformer. Last week it happened in Tbilisi. Next week, or next month, it could happen outside the borders of the U.S.S.R. but still within the empire, in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, East Berlin. Western statesmen have their own dilemma. A crisis in the East, especially if it seemed to be fanned by the West, could play into...
Shortly after noon last Thursday, crockery rattled as a quake hit Tbilisi, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Georgia. It was a minor tremor -- especially when compared with the political convulsion that shook the city four days earlier. Then, at a rally that stretched into the early-morning hours of Sunday, tens of thousands of Georgians listened to a megaphone of speakers demand greater freedom from Moscow. Many protesters carried the black-white-and-claret flag that waved during Georgia's most recent period of independence, from 1918 to 1921. Others hoisted signs that read DOWN WITH THE DECAYING...
...since February 1988, when 32 died after gangs of Azerbaijanis hunted down Armenians in the Azerbaijan city of Sumgait. The authorities immediately imposed an 11 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a native of Georgia, canceled a trip to East and West Germany and flew to Tbilisi, where he appealed for calm. A government commission was set up to investigate the deaths, and Georgian party boss Dzhumber Patiashvili resigned along with two other members of the republic's ruling Politburo. In an emotional speech reported on Vremya, the nightly news program, Patiashvili had already admitted that "this...
...Soviet leadership closed Tbilisi to foreign journalists, but it could not hide from the truth: the thorny problem of nationalism had erupted in violence yet again in one of Mikhail Gorbachev's non-Russian republics. From the Baltic republics to earthquake-devastated Armenia, greater independence from Moscow has become a rallying cry. The latest troubles began last month, when a minority group known as the Abkhazians, who live in an autonomous enclave in the western part of Georgia, demanded full independence. Georgians, who account for 48% of the population in Abkhazia where Abkhazians are a mere 17%, staged counterprotests, which...
...Georgian party's ruling Politburo described the situation in Tbilisi as "strained," with universities and schools still closed by boycotts. Tass said factories and public transport were working normally...