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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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092589
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09258900.034
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1990-09-17
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WORLD, Page 37America AbroadThe Scientist in the KremlinBy Strobe Talbott
The Baltic republics, it is often said, are the "laboratory"
of Mikhail Gorbachev's experiment in liberalization. The metaphor
captures the exhilaration and omihnousness of what is happening,
both there in the Baltics and throughout the U.S.S.R. Glasnost,
elections and free-market economics will help save the Soviet
system from itself, or the mixture will explode.
The citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania love to watch
grainy black-and-white documentary films of what it was like 50
years ago, before their lands were seized by Stalin, invaded by
Hitler, then colonized by the Kremlin. They remember themselves as
having been self-reliant yet outward looking. These are among the
virtues that Gorbachev is now preaching for the Soviet Union as a
whole. He is a Westernizer, in the tradition of an enlightened but
ultimately frustrated school of 19th century Russian reformers. The
Baltics are already the most Westernized of the 15 Soviet
republics, and they are eager to become more so.
The Soviet economy, all but bankrupt when Gorbachev came into
office nearly five years ago, has actually deteriorated. He is
beginning to get the blame. He desperately needs to show that
perestroika is working somewhere, and the Baltics may be the best
chance he has.
Yet the three republics are also the cause of Gorbachev's
greatest anxiety. Thanks to his policies of decentralization and
democratization, the powers that be in the Baltics are looking less
nervously toward Moscow, but they are also listening far more
attentively to their own people.
Increasingly, Baltic leaders are hearing demands for "national
rights." For some proponents the phrase means full sovereignty,
now. For others it means autonomy within a radically more lenient
U.S.S.R. Estonian officials are busily planning to introduce their
own currency, airline and diplomatic missions abroad. The so-called
popular fronts, with their platforms calling for regional
self-determination, are well on their way to taking over the power
structure. The secessionists and the federalists disagree about
tactics and timetable, but not about the dream of independence.
No wonder there is fear and anger in Moscow, particularly among
Gorbachevites. They believe no Kremlin leader can afford to give
up Soviet power, not to mention Soviet territory. Many American
officials share this concern, although they must be careful about
saying so. In a conceit of diplomatic formalism that until recently
seemed quaint and futile, the U.S. Government has never recognized
the legality of the Baltic annexation. Support for human and civil
rights is, or is certainly supposed to be, a constant of American
foreign policy.
But now there is a new factor: George Bush is a Gorbachevite
himself. He doesn't put it that way, nor does he like others to do
so. But the fact remains that for the first time in 72 years, the
U.S. has a stake in the survival and success of a particular Soviet
leader. Bush does not want to see the Baltic laboratory blow up any
more than do the people who live there. Therefore, the American
President is plugging not just for the citizens of those tragic
republics trapped by history within the Soviet Union, but also for
the extraordinary scientist mixing his dangerous chemicals in the
Kremlin.