1. Doyle, Michael W., Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

2. Triska, Jan F., ed., Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), chaps. 4, 9, 14, 15.Google Scholar

3. In the final analysis, any group that considers itself a “nation” is a nation, regardless of its tangible or intangible characteristics. See Walter C. Clemens, Jr., “The Rights of ‘Nations,’” Christian Science Monitor, April 24, 1991, p. 19.Google Scholar

4. Some republics may choose to join with others to form a new state, for example, in parts of Central Asia.Google Scholar

5. Meeting with Lennart Meri on May 24, 1991, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar

6. The Balts could demand, like the Soviet delegation to the 1922 Genoa Economic Conference, that they be paid for lives and property wasted by alien invasion. Computed at just $10,000 per soul, the Baltic claims for lives lost in deportation and other Soviet policies could easily exceed the value of Soviet investments in the Baltic.Google Scholar

7. Meeting at Harvard Faculty club with Lennart Meri, May 24, 1991.Google Scholar

8. For preliminary analyses of the referendum by region, see Report on the USSR, 3, 13 (March 29, 1991).Google Scholar

9. They got a better hearing from President George Bush and Secretary of State Baker in 1991 than in 1990. Lennart Meri recounted on May 24, 1991 that Baker told him: “We will send an ambassador to Estonia when he does not have to get his visa from the USSR.”Google Scholar

10. Representatives of the foreign ministries of the Russian and the three Baltic republics met in Vilnius in February 1991 and in Riga in March. Their meetings were an implementation of the Declaration on Cooperation Between The Baltic Countries And The RSFSR signed in Tallin in January 13, 1991. In Riga, the delegations exchanged information on the population polls and the referendum organized by the USSR, Ekho Litvy, March 22, 1991, p. 1 in FBIS-SOV, April 10, 1991, p. 41.Google Scholar

11. A former Soviet employee working at the UN Secretariat was denounced by the Scientific Secretary at IMEMO, a KGB operative, for having “uncontrollable contacts” with foreigners and compelled to return to Moscow in the mid-1970s. The content of these contacts was not specified. The issue was that they could not be observed and controlled by Soviet officials.Google Scholar

12. Learning that Landsbergis had been nominated by a New York Times columnist, one Baltic leader immediately wondered if this were not a Kremlin or KGB plot to split the Baltic entente.Google Scholar

13. Ekho Litvy, March 22, 1991, p. 1 in FBIS-SOV, April 10, 1991, p. 48.Google Scholar

14. See the official report on the increasing scope being given to republic foreign ministries, going beyond the “formal protocol” activities of recent years because the “command-administrative system did not tolerate polycentrism in diplomacy, wanting also in this sphere to preserve its monopoly.” “Nasha spravka,” Vestnik Ministerstva inostrannykh del SSSR, No. 23, December 15, 1989, pp. 59–60. But when I visited Tbilisi in June 1990 as a guest of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my hosts were embarrassed when, for my stay, the Intourist Hotel demanded dollars—a commodity in short supply. Therefore the ministry asked me to pay, even though I had lectured at the ministry and the university.Google Scholar

15. Suleimenov's book, Az i ia, removed from the book stores in the mid-1970s for being “anti-Russian,” appeared again in 1989 in his Esse, publitsistika, stikhi, poemy (Alma-Ata: Zhalyn, 1989) in a print of 200,000!Google Scholar

16. On February 8, 1990, deputies from Kazakhstan addressed the USSR Supreme Soviet Submcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Econology of the Committee on Ecology and the Rational Use of Natural Resources. They called for juridical investigation of alleged use of humans as subjects in nuclear weapons experiments and, if proved, capital punishment for those found guilty. Their appeal was signed by Iu. N. Shcherbak and six others. Reports on these and related events are well covered in Izbiratel': gazeta obshchestvennogo antiiadernogo dvizheniia “Nevada-Semipalatinsk,” published since February 1990 in Alma-Ata.Google Scholar

17. See materials disseminated by the Union “Chernobyl” in Kiev and art work contributed by Yakut children to the antinuclear congress in Alma-Ata in May 1990, in author's possession.Google Scholar

18. For more detail, see Clemens, Walter C., Jr., “Can a Poet Stop Nuclear Testing?” Christian Science Monitor, December 26, 1990, p. 19.Google Scholar

19. Brown, Bess, “The Strength of Kazakhstan's Antinuclear Lobby,” Report on the USSR, January 25, 1991, pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

20. On Nadezhda radio station belonging to Intermovement and authorized by the USSR Ministry of Defense, see “Garrison TV,” Moscow News, December 30, 1990-January 6, 1991, p. 2.Google Scholar

21. Tiesa, March 6, 1991 in Report on the USSR, April 5, 1991, p. 13.Google Scholar

22. This firm is the first independent television company in Latvia.Google Scholar

23. Yeltsin is respected by some non-Russians, but viewed with deep suspicion by others. If he somehow replaced Gorbachev as Number One, some non-Russians believe he would be equally centrist. He has sought to keep whatever Russia now possesses, including the Kurile Islands.Google Scholar

24. Talk at Harvard University Russian Research Center, April 9, 1991, by Dainis Ivans, First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council, Republic of Latvia.Google Scholar

25. Estimates by Olzhas Suleimenov and other Kazakh leaders interviewed by the author in Alma-Ata and Semipalatinsk in May 1990.Google Scholar

26. See Report on the USSR, April 5, 1991, p. 30.Google Scholar

27. See, for example, Izvestiia, March 30, 1991, p. 1.Google Scholar

28. Interview with General Valentin I. Verennikov on Riga Domestic Service in Russian 26 March, 1991, in FBIS-SOV, 4 April, 1991, pp. 54–55.Google Scholar

29. A scholar at the University of Zurich believes, however, that a proto-federalism has developed in recent years based, inter alia, on horizontal ties among republics. See Stephan Kux, “Soviet Federalism Reconsidered,” presented to a conference in Cortona, May 16-18, 1991.Google Scholar

30. Europe is moving toward confederation, but for the present is barely an economic union, much less a political one. Its members are far apart on many issues. In a crisis like the Gulf War, each went its own way.Google Scholar

31. Schmemann, Serge, “A Cease-Fire of Chieftains,” The New York Times, April 25, 1991, pp. 1, 6.Google Scholar

32. The official Estonian daily Paevaleht reported on September 27, 1991 that the Minister of Internal Affairs, Olev Laanjarv, had announced the first capital punishment in Estonia since 1968. Informants for the Council of Estonia indicated that the convicted criminal was shot in a sauna after a fight with guards.Google Scholar

33. Kaslow, Amy, “Swedish Adviser Says Soviet Republics, West are Squandering Chance to Solve Problems,” Christian Science Monitor, October 23, 1991, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

34. The chance that Tatars in their own Autonomous Republic and Jews in the RFSR would marry their own kind declined drastically in the 1980s. See Gosudarstvennyi Komitet SSSR po Statistiki, Naselenie SSSR 1988: Statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Finansy i statistiki, 1989), analyzed in Walter C. Clemens, Jr., Baltic Independence and the Russian Empire (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), pp. 222–23.Google Scholar

35. South Ossetia's drive to secede from Georgia may be stirred and armed by the Center. Both the South Ossetians and Georgians have a wide range of arms.Google Scholar

36. Clemens, , “The Rights of ‘Nations.’”Google Scholar

37. For more details, see Clemens, Baltic Independence, pp. 41–43 and 285-86. For the broader picture, see Stephan Kux, “Neutrality after Alliance? The Cases of the East Central European and Soviet States,” in Risto Pentillä, ed., The Future of Neutrality (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).Google Scholar