Editorials
CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 16 Correspondence 530 Editorials 531 Act-up v. the church: John A. Coleman 533 Light in August: John Garvey 535 The everlasting dilemma: Paul...
...So for example, while the democratically elected president of Georgia presses for independence, his cabinet resigns over his dictatorial methods of doing business, then joins the opposition, more a momentary coalescence of protestation than the embryonic makings of political parties...
...COMMaMWEAL ---- I Comrades into citizens E vents in the former U.S.S.R...
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...The late August success of the resisters in Moscow, led by the charis- matic Mr...
...The current upheavals may as easily end in political chaos, ethnic hostility, and civil war as in a slow and painful move toward decentralized and democratic institutions...
...04106 (207) 799-4387, classified adver- tising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
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...outpace the capacity of journalists, diplomats, politicians to report and decipher coherent patterns of change or even to devise potentially useful assistance from the West...
...Yet in the weeks since, the constituent pieces of this looser union have become ever more elusive---each part threatening to take leave of the larger body as if each were capable of full-blown economic and political autonomy...
...Can the West help shape the course of events...
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...Of course, there must be a readiness to sustain the democracy movement by words and gestures and a demonstrated willingness to provide material help, humanitarian aid and, where useful, credits and loans...
...Even so, the rapidity and uncertainty of change--not simply in Moscow 27 September 1991:531...
...He spoke of the responsibility of those who call for dissolution "not only to their own people, but to humanity...
...Mikhail Gorbachev in his August 27 speech trying to rally the delegates of the Supreme Soviet, eloquently argued that a union of republics remained an economic and military necessity, while dissolution "would threaten the lives and properties of millions of people...
...Alas, it seems not...
...10038...
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...Editors no less than presidents see events through a fog darkly...
...The immense and complex problems that lie before the now- ramshackle superpower-without-a-name are cause for grave concern, not least because the pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to call a halt to the dissolution of the empire and to fix on a point where the structures of reform can take hold...
...Had the Velvet Revolution come, at last, to the Soviet Union...
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...The local militia take leave of the president and sets up its own encampment outside the capital...
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...Yes and no...
...10038...
...Yeltsin, seemed to create a mythic moment, parallel in rich possibilties to those of the Czechs in Wenceslaus Square and the East Germans before the Berlin Wall in 1989...
...each declaration of independence is followed by hoary claims for redrawing borders...
...Letters should not exceed 250 words and are subject to editing for clarity and spacing limitations...
...And there should be resistance to the notion that an empire disintegrated into petty fiefdoms, some of them nuclear-armed, is a plus for American foreign policy...
...CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 16 Correspondence 530 Editorials 531 Act-up v. the church: John A. Coleman 533 Light in August: John Garvey 535 The everlasting dilemma: Paul Elie 537 O'Malley of Notre Dame: Frank McConnell 543 Clinging to an illusion: John Rodden 547 Stage: Gerald Weales 549 Screen: Richard Alleva 550 BOOKS Holocaust Testimonies: Madeline Marget 552 Bully for Brontosaurus: Nancy M. Haegel 553 An Honorable Profession: Raymond A. Schroth 555 We Must Take Charge: Dennis O'Brien 556 Catholics Coming Home: Karen Sue Smith 558 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Movies: Richard Alleva Stage: Gerald Weales Poetry: Rosemary Deen Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy, David R. Carlin, Jr...
...Where and how will this momen- tum-and others equally dangerous--slow...
...What may be manageable in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will be problematic even for the relatively prosperous Ukraine and Georgia, to say nothing of fractious Armenia and Azerbaijan...
...We do not have the right to make a mistake of this nature...
...In all of them, the economic and political problematics are subject to fracturing by ethnic minorities...
...Portland, Me...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 16
