TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062491/0624002.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 85 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 31

AMERICA ABROAD

The Price of Freedom


By Strobe Talbott


    VILNIUS. While Russia was electing its first real
President, the Baltic republics were going about their own
democratic business. In Estonia, four anticommunist parties
pushed for legislation to break up collective farms and convert
them into private plots. In Latvia, parliamentarians vigorously
debated emergency health care for local soldiers who helped
clean up the Chernobyl disaster five years ago. In Lithuania,
the Supreme Council passed a new social-welfare bill that will
require raising taxes.

    The Balts' strategy is to achieve sovereignty in
increments. They have already established their own border posts
and invited Western economists to advise them on how to set up
their own banks. They are trying to introduce their own systems
of insurance and taxation as well as their own postage stamps
and passports. Two weeks ago, the three Baltic governments
called on the KGB to abolish its branch offices in the
republics. Last week the three Presidents announced their
intention to sign an international treaty curbing the spread of
nuclear weapons. They were putting the Soviet Union on notice
that it must someday remove its nukes from their territory.

    Sooner or later, however, the Balts need the Kremlin's
acquiescence to be truly independent. For that they are counting
on a combination of pressures from inside and outside the
U.S.S.R.

    Most Balts were rooting for Boris Yeltsin to win the
Russian presidency. "During Yeltsin's campaign he backed our
cause," says Marju Lauristin, head of the Estonian Social
Democratic Party. "However, he was severely attacked for doing
so, and even with his new mandate, there will continue to be
political forces hostile to us."

    Mavriks Vulfsons, chairman of the foreign affairs
committee of the Latvian parliament, agrees that Yeltsin's
victory is a "glimmer of hope," but he warns: "Hard-line
imperialists have lost a battle, not the war."

    Vulfsons believes that Gorbachev is still indispensable as
President of the U.S.S.R. "Gorbachev is a brilliant tactician,"
he says. "Only he can keep control over the dark underside of
Russian nationalism, particularly in its colonialist form."

    That force erupted on two bloody Sundays in January, when
Black Beret special forces and other Soviet units killed at
least 18 people in Vilnius and Riga. Last Friday, Black Berets
burned a Lithuanian customs post on the Latvian border and
sebeat an unarmed guard. The entrances to official buildings
throughout the Baltics are barricaded with concrete slabs, some
decorated with patriotic murals. Now Moscow is threatening to
impose economic sanctions on any republic that secedes, and the
general staff of the armed forces is insisting that the Baltic
governments pay "financial compensation" for any of their
citizens who resist the draft.

    Ironically, this may turn out to be good news. By
demanding that the Balts fork over what amounts to reparations
for living under Soviet occupation for 51 years, Moscow seems
to have conceded the principle of freedom and opened the bidding
on its price. "We are ready to start negotiations any time,"
says Lithuanian Vice President Ceslovas Stankevicius.

    Gorbachev will be in London next month, hat in hand,
appealing for aid from the major industrialized democracies. If
the leaders there oblige him with any money at all, they should
make clear they are underwriting not just the future of reform
inside the U.S.S.R. but the right of the Balts to leave without
being mugged on their way out the door. Call it ransom -- but
it would be worth it.