Word: within
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most of the time, that strategy worked. But during the past year or so it has been falling apart. The reform forces have lost all cohesion, splintering into myriad tiny groups. All 15 Soviet republics have declared sovereignty, and so have regions and even cities within republics, producing a state of near anarchy. Gorbachev lost his best and perhaps his last chance to remain the leader of the reformists in October when he backed away from a 500-Day Plan for radical economic reform that had been worked out with Russian republic leader Boris Yeltsin, his chief domestic rival. When...
...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 week that 30 days earlier, hard-liners...
...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...
Gorbachev, frustrated over the refusal of many republics to accept his draft of a new treaty of union, asserted that he would submit it to a popular referendum within each republic; the Baltic republics promptly declared that they would not let such a referendum be held on their turf. Most ominous, Gorbachev announced that he might introduce a "state of emergency or presidential rule" in areas where the "situation becomes especially tense and there is a serious threat to the state and to people's well-being." That might have been the trigger for Shevardnadze's resignation...
...would have been impossible on such a scale. It was a question not only of raw materials but of cooperation and markets. Our economy was based on specific trading patterns within Comecon. Hundreds of enterprises were working to produce goods for the Soviet economy, goods the West would not buy because of quality or other factors. We could not switch overnight, and we still cannot do it today. Imagine the scenario had the opposition ((Solidarity)) taken over in the autumn of 1981 and inherited such an economic situation on the eve of winter, when there were already serious shortages...