Ethnic Passion: EASTERN EUROPE'S IDENTITY CRISIS
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Rallies and marches in Slovenia and Serbia in Yugoslavia. Popular protests and popular fronts in Soviet Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Flight from Romania's Transylvania. Riots in Azerbaijan.The fires of nationalism are being rekindled this year in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans and east to the Caspian Sea. The sparks carry a defiant message for communist governments. "Simple," says Milovan Djilas, the most...
Ethnic Passion: WILL U.S. MAKE MOST OF COMMUNIST CHANGE?
EVEN IF you doubted the Pentagon's persistent characterization of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc as 10 feet tall, the pace of events there now is truly breathtaking.I remember prowling around Eastern Europe in 1982 and the Soviet Union in 1983 and asking myself how such backward and repressive countries could possibly be as strong militarily as they were said to be by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. Here were societies that couldn't make their...
Ethnic Passion: Nagorno-Karabakh remains trouble spot for Gorbachev
Moscow retains only titular control of Asian region plagued by unrest
BADARA, U.S.S.R. -- From the windows of her living room, Galya Israelyan can look down over the rooftops of this Armenian village, out to the green and gold mountains and the clearing where a few days ago her husband, Ruben, was shot dead.He was 32, and the father of five, including a newborn daughter, when he became a casualty in the Soviet Union's bloodiest and most intractable nationalist feud in recent years. Although the police say their investigation is unfinished, the...
Ethnic Passion: SLOVAKS AND CZECHS
WHEN THEY jeered and jostled Vaclav Havel, Slovak nationalists were giving a demonstration of the overheated ethnic passion that has become the leading threat to their country. Mr. Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia and a genuine democrat, is regarded in the West as a hero. But to Slovaks, or at least to some of them, he has become a much resented symbol of Czech influence and, as a Marxist would say, hegemony. The nationalists are now calling for secession Is this going to be the fate of...
Ethnic Passion: Eastern Europe unrest follows longtime repression
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - Rallies in Slovenia. Marches in Serbia. Tension in Kosovo. Popular protests and popular fronts in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Flight from Romania's Transylvania. Riots in Azerbaijan. The fires of nationalism are rekindling this year in Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Balkans and east to the Caspian Sea.The sparks carry a defiant message for the communist governments.``Simple,'' says Milovan Djilas, the most prominent...