The Empire Strikes Out

...Horyn, whose mass movement commands majority support in the 52-million-strong second Soviet Republic, and Kazimieras Uoka, who heads Lithuania's privatization program, believe that if within the next several months the process of change proceeds without a martial law crackdown, then the independence of the republics will be assured...

...More surprising is that fully 41 percent of Russians in the Baltics favored secession, with 50 percent opposed...

...A transition to full democracy will mean that many of the USSR's constituent republics will likely split off...

...F-T1 he effort to fashion a union 1 treaty centers on a series of consultations among the elected leaders of the USSR's constituent republics...

...If we start splitting there will be war...

...This is why they question the Bush Administration's tilt toward President Gorbachev...

...Pretty soon, it will be Yeltsin who has control of the finger on the trigger...

...One such cooperative grouping is the Baltic Council, created by the new democratic governments of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia...

...According to a poll released in late October by the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion, among Ukrainians support for secession stood at 55 percent for and 26 percent against, with the balance undecided...

...Either the 1...

...By the fall of 1990, sentiment for secession was dominant in most of the republics...

...If a people strives for independence, you cannot restrain them by force...

...There will be conflict, there will be a dreadful war...

...In Moscow and Leningrad, in the Baltic states, and in large parts of the Ukraine including Kiev and Lvov, nationalists and democrats are in control of education, public works, and large segments of the mass media...

...Rhetorical bluster has been a regular feature of attempts to inhibit independence-minded groups and republic parliaments...

...Similar inequities are found in infant mortality, health care facilities, access to cultural amenities, book publishing, and the press...

...In many republics, hundreds of thousands have again taken to the streets to pressure local parliaments...

...In August industrial production fell by a further 1.7 percent, suggesting an annual drop of 20 percent...

...With the collapse of Marxist-Leninist ideology, what set of beliefs would prompt such an action...

...A mid-July poll of 2,680 citizens by a Soviet public opinion concern shows that 61.3 percent approved fully of Yeltsin's activities, with 21 percent not fully approving, and only 5.3 percent not approving at all...

...From the point of view of the center there is chaos, agrees the radical democratic activist Nina Belayeva, but from the point of view of the emerging democratic centers new relations are being shaped and a consolidation is occurring...

...The absence of a deep democratic Russian tradition gives us pause about linking our nation's fortunes with Russia," he says...

...The central, all-union authorities "will receive funds to finance only programs in which the people are really interested...

...Strikes have increased by 300 percent in the last year, to an annual rate of 20 million lost work days...

...in the 1960s on Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Several Turkic republics are reintroducing Latin script...

...Soviet Union will revert to mass repression or its republics will move boldly to full independence or sovereignty, perhaps by fashioning a poor man's version of the European Community...

...Now he purports to be leading a calm renegotiation of a new "treaty of the Union...

...In the months that followed, Yeltsin took the lead in defending the Russian Federation and other republics from the centralizing tendencies of the Kremlin...

...As reported by Izvestiya on September 5, the Shatalin plan envisioned that "the level of basic taxes and the forms and methods of privatization will be determined at the republic level, and the prices of most goods will be regulated at the same level...

...For Gorbachev, the poll registered 28.5 percent as fully approving, 40 percent not fully approving, and 19.5 percent not approving at all...

...Many of the patriotic, pro-independence movements will have to confront enormous challenges if they are to sort out the shaping of a renewed statehood...

...A radical officers' group, the Shield, openly backs radical critics of Mikhail Gorbachev...

...In the Soviet south, where the Is- lamic Turkic peoples predominate, rates of poverty and unemployment are appalling...

...Solidarity has sent organizing and printing experts to the Soviet Union to pass on skills to Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Lithuanian independence groups...

...Such fears of violence are overdrawn, part of the center's last desperate argument against the forces of democratic nationalism...

...Ivan Polozkov, the reactionary leader of the Russian Communist party, has revealed that, as a result of declining membership and collapsing revenues, the Russian party will be forced to lay off at least half of its 120,000 full-time workers, despite an anticipated subsidy of 285 million rubles from the central CPSU...

...Even in the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin is pressing for a sovereign Russian state within the context of a "cornity" or "confederation" of nations in which the central state authorities would be responsible only for the coordination 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 of defense and the maintenance of a unitary currency...

...The military has been in the forefront of this pressure for a restoration of order and discipline...

...On August 29, the representatives of Yeltsin's Democratic Russia bloc and the Ukraine's National Council (the democratic parliamentary mi- nority) signed an agreement that com- mits the two movements to the creation of "democratic independent states" in their republics and promises the quick "establishment of diplomatic and con- sular relations" between the Ukraine and Russia...

...Demographics, too, portends a breakup...

...Russians in the Ukraine also backed secession by a mar-gin of 46 to 38 percent...

...C omething has to give...

...But the three Baltic republics are boycotting the talks...

...Two million Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians have linked arms in a human chain along the Baltic littoral...

...He favors a limited central government that would coordinate what amounts to an economic union of sovereign states...

...Of course, it is the center's attempts to annul or disrupt the new emerging relationships between the republics that is contributing to chaos...

...With the election of Boris Yeltsin to the chairmanship of the Russian republic's parliament, the cause of sovereignty for the republics gained a powerful advocate...

...In 1989, 6,500 young men failed to appear for military duty, the lion's share of them from the Baltic states, where pro-independence forces encourage resistance to service in the "army of occupation...

...It had been the breeding ground for the dehumanized perpetrators of violent pogroms against Armenians and Russians of Baku...

...Indeed, it is the forces of patriotism that are creating the preconditions for the emergence of democratic politics in the USSR...

...In the first half of 1990, economic production fell by 2 percent and worker productivity by 1.5 percent...

...As in 1917, power is lying in the streets and it is the patriotic democratic movements that are grabbing it...

...As the numerical and proportional strength of the non-Russians increases, so does their national assertiveness...

...Economic agreements signed in the USSR may not be worth the paper they are written on...

...And one Russian parliamentarian close to Boris Yeltsin told me that more and more Russian officers and sergeants now support the Russian and not the Soviet government...

...It is no wonder that such con- ditions bring about ethnic violence...

...In Novy Uzen, Kazakhstan, whereriots broke out in the summer of 1989, schools are overcrowded by 50 percent, nearly 10 percent of the population of 56,000 is on waiting lists for housing, 4.3 percent of the population has tu- berculosis, ordinary citizens do not have telephone service, and meat and potatoes are rationed...

...By November, Russia and the Ukraine had signed a treaty incor- porating these very principles...

...s the Soviet Union plunges headlong into a new political arrangement, the United States is a passive and fearful bystander...

...The rise of the USSR's long suppressed nations and nationalisms could perhaps be managed by as resourceful a politician as Mikhail Gorbachev...

...There will be no need for a USSR Constitution: "only Union republics will have constitutions...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 Among Western policy-makers, the separatist movements have caused concern that the USSR could become Balkanized and highly unstable...

...From Alma-Ata in the shadows of the Tien Shan Mountains to Tallinn on the shores of the Baltic, the USSR has been swept by public protest and reanimated nationalism...

...eltsin has emerged as the USSR's 1 single most popular politician...

...It now appears virtually certain that any Gorbachev-styled union treaty based on a strong central state apparatus will be rejected by the majority of the republics...

...The moderate leaders of these movements are steering the locus of conflict toward electoral and parliamentary politics, while not shying away from the more confrontational politics of strikes and demonstrations to push aside the moribund structure of the party apparat...

...But the Soviet authorities, fear- ing the transfer of power to the demo- cratic forces, moved in and violently crushed resistance...

...It is an open question whether the recent rhetorical hard line is evidence of Gorbachev's readiness to use force to defeat democratic separatists...

...In fact, ethnic violence has been limited to the Soviet south, and is the by-product of intense poverty occasioned by malign neglect from Moscow...

...If someone like Shevardnadze is bailing out, the independence movements can only gain greater confidence in their belief that the center will not hold...

...The majorities for independence were overwhelming among Georgians (92 percent for, 1 against) and among the indigenous peoples of the Baltic states (91-1 percent...

...And just a week after Marshal Yazov's tough TV talk, he declared that no Red Armyserviceman would be compelled to serve in ethnic trouble spots...

...42-41 percent...

...He is trying his best to convey an image of control over a process that appears to have run away from him...

...And, as one leading party official admitted, "A certain concern is caused by the fact that there are very few young people among the new party members...

...W hile much has recently been written of the radical "500 Days" economic reform plan drafted by Stanislav Shatalin, what has gone virtually unnoticed is its radical restructuring of the USSR into a decentralized community of sovereign nations...

...Infant mortality rates stand at Third World levels, in some regions reaching 100 per 1,000 births...

...A coalition of pro-independence groups and insurgent independent miners' organizations now commands broad public support in the Ukraine...

...It is an open question whether the recent rhetorical hard line is evidence of Gorbachev's readiness to use force to defeat democratic separatists...

...Much ethnic violence is in fact a product of acute poverty...

...Gorbachev is now perhaps the President only of Central Asia," says Oleg Rumyantsev, the right-hand man of Yeltsin who wrote the draft of the Russian republic's new constitution...

...The Soviet military, in which the majority of recruits are non-Russian, may no longer be a reliable instrument for quelling nationalist unrest...

...Each republic will elaborate its own system of social guarantees and will autonomously form republic budgets...

...According to Georgetown University's Murray Feshbach, of 3,900 non-combat related deaths last year, nearly 3,000 have been linked to ethnicity-related hazing, bullying, and male rape...

...In early September, Polish Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski characterized Poland's new policy as one that recognizes it will now have "many neighbors on its Eastern borders" in place of a single Soviet Union...

...The consultation intended to bring order to the nationalist ferment is instead fueling disintegration and has led to a spate of sovereignty declarations in the republic parliaments, which many view as staking out bargaining positions...

...Although it accounts for a little over half the USSR's population, Russia holds more than 61 percent of all fixed assets...

...Similar treaties have been signed between the Ukraine and Lithuania, Lithuania and Russia, and Russia and Kazakhstan...

...The Russian republic is a state, a sovereign state, and it must have all functions of power," he asserted in...

...The acuteness of inter-ethnic relations has acquired a dangerous nature...

...Over the last two years, Gorbachev has blustered, bullied, and blackmailed democratic movements pressing for national sovereignty...

...The role of the center is restricted to a few prerogatives delegated by the "sovereign republics" and includes acting as a clearinghouse to "ensure the greatest possible agreement in the implementation of reforms...

...With regard to Lithuania, it is a major political mistake," Yeltsin declared...

...Lech Walesa's political supporters also have welcomed Ukrainian and Baltic declarations of independence or sovereignty, echoing their leader's personal view that the Soviet Union will not survive for more than two years...

...In an August 29 article in Izvestia, S. Alekseyev, head of the USSR legislature's Constitutional Oversight Committee, admitted that the body's work "has found itself temporarily paralyzed" in the face of proclamations of national sovereignty or outright independence by most republics...

...An extreme situation has taken shape in the country, which demands the adoption of radical measures...

...Pressed by a resurgent Ukrainian patriotism and driven by the revival of national Communism, the hard-line Communist chairman of the Ukrainian parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, asserted on September 8: "We do not intend to create a unitary state, but a commonwealth of free, sovereign, socialist states...

...Indeed, despite the violent disruptions it has wrought, ethnic violence has been largely a peripheral phenomenon...

...But it is not the aims of these groups that are destabilizing...

...The real events of political life have brought [the USSR] to a point beyond which general paralysis, general incapacity, and the withering and collapse of the Union and all its institutions and subdivisions begin...

...All around the Soviet Union are the signs of an empire in retreat...

...That's only the beginning of the bad news...

...This politicization has created growing conflicts with ethnic Russian recruits, leading to mistreatment and even murder of soldiers from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia...

...Shatalin's plan would have transformed the USSR into an "economic union" modeled on the European Community, in which membership is voluntary "and the right to freely withdraw" is protected...

...Gorbachev has joined this chorus of intimidation, arguing ad nauseam that the collapse of the central authority is contributing to mounting disorder and economic chaos...

...In Russia itself, 44 percent of Russians favored secession, with 41 percent opposed...

...The poll's results have yet to be published in the Soviet press...

...Indeed, the forces of democratic nationalism are committed to peaceful protest and parliamentary means...

...In November elections, pro-independence parties led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia captured more than 70 percent of the vote in Georgia...

...Disintegration is occurring in the structure of executive power...

...A poll conducted last February, primarily in Russian cities, showed that 52.5 percent of those polled supported the right of republics to secede from the USSR...

...Additional hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have commemorated the anniversary of the 1918 proclamation of their country's independence...

...The USSR's central functions will be strictly limited, said the Ukrainian leader, to "six or seven areas," with the right of "recalling" powers from the center or "seceding" if "anything goes wrong...

...Armenia is moving to constitute its own defense forces and neighboring Azerbaijan appears poised to follow...

...Yet whether the USSR exists or disintegrates, the republics will exist and the agreements entered into with them will have a force of law and ensure continuity...

...And this is right...

...In the last ten years some two million Russians and other Slays have migrated out of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan...

...On July 30, the increasingly radical Ukrainian parliament voted for an immediate recall of all Ukrainian citizens serving outside their region—the first step toward the fulfillment of the republic's pledge to take control of its military and security apparatus as a non-aligned state...

...For five years, the U.S...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 25...

...More significantly, statistics measuring the percapita purchases of food, clothing, electronics, cars, and other consumer goods show a 30 percent advantage for residents of Russia...

...Working groups from the Russian republic, Moldova (as Moldavia has newly named itself), and the Ukraine have presented ideas radically at odds with Gorbachev's...

...Soon, untold thousands may be fleeing wetsward...

...Nationalist movements have a number of inequities to point to as they mobilize public support...

...On the evidence of recent days, Brzezinski's daring prediction may prove insufficiently bold...

...According to Izvestiya, the poverty rate stood at 37 percent in Ta- dzikistan, 45 percent in Uzbekistan, and 59 percent in Turkmenistan...

...Support is mounting for national self-determination, including secession, among Russians...

...He is popular in his home base of Russia and he is popular in the non-Russian republics, where he is seen as a proponent of voluntary union, thus of independence...

...In Baku, a city that for over a century had seen various ethnic com- munities living in relative harmony, violence in January 1990 was fueled by economic misery, symbolized by a vast shanty town (Khutor) of 200,000 on the outskirts of the city...

...His stratagem might have succeeded in the short term had it not been repudiated by the Russian republic...

...On November 28, President Gorbachev warned a group of the USSR's leading official cultural figures of mounting "anarchy" and "counterrevolution" that have resulted in "the paralysis of executive power...

...Horyn notes that to participate in a commonwealth is to join with Russia...

...When the idea of a new treaty was first floated, Gorbachev probably envisioned a problem-free process in which the pliant satraps of the empire would try to sell a new formula for a unitary state to the peoples of the USSR...

...and the return of large numbers of Russians to their ancestral land—European Russia...

...A mood of crisis appears to have infected the upper rungs of the Soviet establishment...

...Russian flight and high birth rates have made the republics of the Turkic Soviet south more ethnically specific...

...Indeed, to equate the violence that has erupted in the Soviet south with that of emerging democratic national- isms would be like blaming ghetto riots in the U.S...

...Only in the Asian republics is secession opposed by a majority (54-24 percent) of the indigenous peoples, with a slightly lower margin among Russians...

...view Brzezinski, who correctly predicted the collapse of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe, asserted: "The Soviet Union is doomed...

...Among agricultural workers, the gap is far wider...

...As Rukh leader Horyn points out, "In the context of ongoing changes, the continued existence of the all-union center is questionable...

...According to University of Cincinnati professor of finance Z. L. Melnyk, some 20 percent of the national income of the Ukraine has been transferred out of the republic, a level he says "is unprecedented in international economic relations...

...rather, it is the structure of the current empire that is untenable...

...On November 26, the USSR Supreme Soviet described the state of affairs thusly: "The situation in the country continues to deteriorate and is approaching a critical situation...

...At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, ZbigAdrian Karatnycky, director of research at the AFL-CIO Department of International Affairg is co-author (with Nadia Diuk) of The Hidden Nations: The People Challenge the Soviet Union, published last fall by William Morrow...

...Among the peoples of the Soviet south, a new movement for national sovereignty based on pan Turkism rather than Islam, is gaining rapid acceptance among the intelligentsia and the working classes of the Kazakh, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and Kirghiz peoples...

...And in Byelorussia, Russians were even more supportive of secession than the indigenous Byelorussians (by 55-33 percent vs...

...And the more pressure the authorities exert, the stronger the people's resistance will be...

...Crowds of as many as one million Armenians and Azerbaijanis have swelled the public squares of their capital cities...

...In last summer's military call-up, draft dodging was massive: in Armenia only 7.5 percent of the expected recruits turned up, in Georgia 27.5 percent, in Lithuania 33 percent, in Estonia 40 percent, and in Latvia 54 percent...

...Even in the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Moldavia, and Byelorussia, the growth of the Russian population began to slow in the 1980s...

...And Armenia's and Georgia's recently elected leaders say they want no part of any new USSR...

...Despite a bumper crop, the Soviet harvest is down from 1989, due in part to the catastrophic state of farm equipment: 120,000 harvesters stand idle for lack of spare parts...

...Such issues, which have been seized on by leaders of the Ukrainian Popular Movement (Rukh), resonate not only among ethnic Ukrainians, who constitute 37 million of the republic's citizens, but among its 11 million Russians and half a million Jews...

...By the fall of 1990, in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, more than 35,000 (10 percent) of the expected draftees had failed to appear, and there had been over 3,500 desertions...

...In each of the republics, once-loyalist parties are coming under pressure of local nationalisms and distancing themselves from the imperial center...

...Still, the power that President Gorbachev wields is immense...

...In a somber television address on November 27, Marshal Dmitri Yazov, the defense minister, assured the Soviet public that the army can be counted on to preserve the union and warned that the army will shoot anyone who attacks the military...

...T he Communist party itself is rent 1 by growing disunity...

...The Soviet Union can survive only through a crackdown and mass repression—as an empire maintained at the barrel of a gun...

...The USSR now confronts a massiverefugee problem, with 600,000 displaced citizens in search of permanent housing and new jobs...

...For there was no such blockade against Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or the GDR...

...Tens of thousands are Russians who fled Baku after riots last January...

...Order was quickly restored, largely through the action of the local Popular Front...

...Yet, even at a time of tough talk by Gorbachev, a strong argument can be made that the prospect of a mass crackdown is now unlikely...

...Increasingly, the party is breaking up into factions, with one, the Marxist Platform, espousing a backward-looking orthodoxy and another, the Democratic Platform, leading an exodus of disgruntled reformers...

...government and its European counterparts have placed their money on President THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 23 Gorbachev, but in the USSR today he is increasingly viewed as a man whom history's parade has passed by...

...Last August, Gorbachev threatened to use military force to crush pro-independence forces only to back down when the deadline came...

...In the final analysis, about the only thing that seems certain is that there will not be and cannot be what the Bush Administration seems to want—a democratic Soviet Union...

...According to Rumyantsev, a confederation of nations is likely to dispense with a unitary state...

...And in a head-to-head popularity contest, 34.2 percent of Soviet citizens named Yeltsin, while 10.2 percent named Gorbachev, and only 2.7 percent embattled Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov...

...In Armenia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia nationalist forces already dominate republic legislatures...

...He intoned in dire, if familiar, terms: "We must not be divided...

...The fear of impending violence or inter-ethnic war is extremist, a conve- nient caricature of a more complex so- cial and political reality...

...Only 7 percent were clearly opposed...

...It is no wonder that Gorbachev has resisted these formulations, which cut to the heart of his power...

...And in the aftermath of last January's brutal military occupation of Baku, the Azerbaijani Popular Front enjoys overwhelming popularity...

...Some 240,000 of these refugees are Armenians and 190,000 are Azerbaijanis driven out of Armenia...

...In the six months before the defections of Boris Yeltsin and the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad last year, the party suffered a net loss of 770,000 members, about 5 percent of its membership...

...In an August 8 interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yeltsin was outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet empire...

...Even without resort to the military, the Soviet President has a combined force of nearly 1.5 million KGB and Interior Ministry troops...

...Even in Central Asia, it is the national democratic movements and not the presence of the Red Army or the USSR's militia that has injected a climate of peaceful discourse and stability into political life...

...A more responsible realpolitik is emerging in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, where independent parties, trade unions, and democratic groups are reaching out to counterparts in the disintegrating Soviet empire...

...it will not endure and will probably cease to exist as we know it in a few years...

...Even in the relatively prosperous Slavic Ukraine, the basis for local grievance is great...

...It is precisely such reasoning that must have provoked Eduard Shevardnadze's dramatic resignation as foreign minister and his stirring call for democrats to rally against the imposition of dictatorship...

...In May 1990, representatives of the Ukrainian Rukh, the popular fronts of Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Georgia, and Latvia, Lithuania's Sajudis, Uzbekistan's Birlik, and Russian democrats met in Kiev to form the Union of Democratic Forces, which would act as a kind of information-consultation committee to help promote the decolonization of the Soviet Union...

...Parallel power, exercised through city, territorial, and republic councils (soviets), is rapidly eroding the prerogatives of the center...

...Mykhaylo Horyn, who heads the Ukrainian Rukh, jokes: "Gorbachev will soon be president of the Kremlin, i.e., he'll preside over a territory of several hundred acres...

...oday political forces favoring national sovereignty either possess an outright parliamentary majority or command the support of public opinion...

...In recent weeks, the Soviet press has been filled with urgent calls for the imposition of an iron hand...

...Yazov was lashing out at straw men: there are no mass-based nationalist movements seeking to take over Soviet military installations by force...

...Soviet citizens of most nationalities have come to recognize that the hyper-centralization and gigantism of the economic structures of the union must be dismantled and that the republics' best chance to escape the stranglehold of the old order will be by going it alone...

...But, amid mounting economic and political setbacks and evidence of military dissension, it appears a hopeless task...

...The first step in assisting emerging democratic movements is to establish contact...

...Already the Communist parties in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have left Moscow's orbit, and those in Georgia and Armenia have been taken up by nationalist passions...

...In Moscow and Leningrad, residents queue endlessly for bread, cigarettes, and gasoline...

...And though prices throughout the USSR have historically been uniform, Russians earn 11 percent more than their non-Russian counterparts...

...The silence, which began with the shameful repudiation of Lithuania's reassertion of national independence, has been deafening...

...Others feel that Gorbachev's diminished role may soon resemble that of the European Community's Jacques Delors or the United Nations' Miguel Perez de Cuellar...

...Gorbachev must expend more and more political capital to hold the country and party-state structures together...

...And those that choose to remain are likely to join what is in essence a loose confederation based on economic treaties and mutual defense pacts...

...There will be economies to rebuild, constitutions to write, electoral campaigns to wage, trade unions to organize, environments to protect, independent newspapers to create...

...Census statistics for 1989 show two broad trends: the proportional decline of the ethnically Russian population...

...They are also seeking to develop cooperative strategies and to negotiate disputes among themselves...

...As part of the tougher Kremlin line, in several republics, Corn-,munist legislatures passed laws restricting the right to demonstrate and leading opposition figures have been arrested in the Ukraine and Central_ Asia...

...Even parliaments with a Communist majority are seeking to preempt pro-independence forces by declaring "national sovereignty" and "the primacy of local laws...

...There are great imbalances in the living standards of the republics, particularly between the Russian and non-Russian...

...a November interview...

...Gor- bachev now confronts alarming rates of unemployment: 28 percent in Azer- baijan, 36 percent in Tadzikistan, 23 percent in Uzbekistan, and 19 percent in Turkmenistan, 19 percent in earthquake-ravaged Armenia, and 16 percent in Kirghizia...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 21 Many Soviet draftees, particularly non-Russians, have been active in patriotic demonstrations, general strikes, and informal youth organizations...

...Economic assistance to the central state structures is almost certain to be squandered...

...Another 14 percent partly endorsed this right...

...He called for "normal relations, not slave relations" between countries and denounced the Gorbachev policy of blockading republics making a dash for independence...