Tuesday, 12 May 2009

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Yeltsin and the dissolution of the USSR On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to stop their monopoly on power. During next several weeks, the 15 constituent republics of the USSR held its first competitive elections. The reformers and the ethnic nationalists won many of the seats. The constituent republics began to assert its national sovereignty over Moscow and started a "war of laws" with the central government, in which the governments of the constituent republics rejected the uniform law, which entered into conflict with local laws, asserting control of their local economies and refusing to pay income tax to central government in Moscow. This struggle caused the economic dislocation, as supply lines were broken in the economy and caused the Soviet economy fall forward. The pro-independence movement in Lithuania, S'j'dis established on June 3, 1988, caused a visit by Gorbachev in January 1990 to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, which provoked a pro-independence reunion of about 250,000 people . On March 11, 1990, Lithuania, led by the chairman of the Supreme Council Vytautas Landsbergis, declared independence. However, the Soviet Army with tanks moving. Start the Soviet Union an economic blockade of Lithuania and kept troops there "to ensure the rights of the Russians." Boris Yeltsin, in a 1989 photograph. On March 30, 1990, the Estonian Supreme Council declared that the Soviet power in Estonia since 1940 had been illegal, and had begun a process to restore Estonia as an independent state. The process of restoring the independence of Latvia began on May 4, 1990, with a vote of the Supreme Lao stipulating a transitional period to complete independence. On January 13, 1991, Soviet troops, along with the Alfa group Spetsnaz KGB, stormed the Vilnius TV tower to remove the national average. This ended with 14 unarmed Lithuanian civilians...