News coming from the Soviet Union today, or what was becoming left of it.
The presidents of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia hold a Baltic summit this weekend to revive a prewar alliance and coordinate their separatist policies toward Moscow, spokesmen said Friday. The Kremlin was reported Friday to have taken its first steps against Latvia and Estonia, stopping transfers of hard currency to those two republics as well as Lithuania. Lithuania declared its independence March 11 and suffered a cutoff of Soviet oil and natural gas as a result. In Latvia, food rationing plans were announced Friday.
Estonian President Arnold Ruutel invited Vytautas Landsbergis of Lithuania and Anatoly Gorbunov of Latvia to sign an agreement Saturday reviving a Baltic council created in 1934 when the republics were independent, said Raul Malk, a spokesman for Estonia’s Parliament. Officials in the offices of Landsbergis and Gorbunov said both would attend. Baltic state representatives set up the council in September 1934 in Geneva under an agreement of “unity and cooperation.” A 1971 Soviet history book said the alliance became “a hotbed of antiSoviet agitation.” The second agreement to be signed would coordinate efforts to control the draft of Baltic residents into the Soviet armed forces. The three republics were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and are in the process of seceding. The Council of Baltic States will consist of the presidents and senior ministers of the three republics, and will make non-binding recommendations on the governments, Estonian officials said.
Meanwhile, insulting or slandering president Mikhail Gorbachev could earn six years in prison under a draft law considered by the Soviet parliament day. The proposed law follows unprecedented public attacks on the Soviet leader.
And only two weeks before President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sit down together in Washington, their critical meeting could be labeled the “‘Uncertain Summit.’ Summits usually are carefully scripted events, staged to sign and celebrate predetermined agreements. Not so this time. The meeting scheduled for May 30 to June 3 is loaded with risks, uncertainties and the potential for big surprises – both good and bad. Gorbachev – always unpredictable, given to bold, dramatic gestures comes to this summit from extreme instability at home, with his economy crumbling, his empire straining at the seams, his very survival in question. Will domestic turmoil make him cautious or desperate to achieve some stunning summit success.
Bush never the gambler approaches the summit with a stronger hand, but aware of the awkward timing. Just when Gorbachev is applying an economic embargo on secessionist Lithuania, Bush approaches the table with a proposed trade agreement and other economic goodies. Moreover, something seems to have gone awry in the long, complex negotiations that are supposed to prepare a strategic arms control agreement – START -for this meeting. Soviet negotiators became unexpectedly balky in April, slowing the progress toward agreement and raising White House doubts about Soviet motives. To try to learn what’s going on and to reduce the danger of a summit that fails, Secretary of State James Baker flies Monday to see Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow.
“A lot is riding on this” mission, a worried Bush summit strategist said. “We are going to go into this summit with a tremendous number of uncertainties,” predicted Robert Hormats, a Soviet affairs specialist who served under the four previous presidents. “‘In other summits, we have gone in with everything precooked,” he said. But officials now seem puzzled by conflicting signals from Moscow, especially on arms control.
That’s just a sample of what went on, this May 12, 1990 as reported by The CBS World News Roundup from KNX-AM Los Angeles.
