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This volume is one in a continuing series of books prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress. This volume is about Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Latvia stands out as the East European country hardest hit by the global financial crisis; it lost approximately 25 percent of its GDP between 2008 and 2010. It was also the most overheated economy before the crisis. But in the second half of 2010, Latvia returned to economic growth. How did this happen so quickly? Current Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who shepherded Latvia through the crisis, and renowned author Anders slund discuss why the Latvian economy became so overheated; why an IMF and European Union stabilization program was needed; what the Latvian government did to resolve the financial crisis and why it made these choices; and what the outcome has been. This book offers a rare insider's look at how a national government responded to a global financial crisis, made tough choices, and led the country back to economic growth.
In March 2003, the United States and Great Britain invaded Iraq to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. The war was launched without a United Nations mandate and was based on the erroneous claim that Iraq had retained weapons of mass destruction. France, under President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, spectacularly opposed the United States and British invasion, leading a global coalition against the war that also included Germany and Russia. The diplomatic crisis leading up to the war shook both French and American perceptions of each other and revealed cracks in the transatlantic relationship that had been building since the end of the Cold War. Based on exclusive French archival sources and numerous interviews with former officials in both France and the United States, A History of the Iraq Crisis retraces the international exchange that culminated in the 2003 Iraq conflict. It shows how and why the Iraq crisis led to a confrontation between two longtime allies unprecedented since the time of Charles de Gaulle, and it exposes the deep and ongoing divisions within Europe, the Atlantic alliance, and the international community as a whole. The Franco-American narrative offers a unique prism through which the American road to war can be better understood.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev. "Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]." —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.
This book explores Lithuania's pagan ancestry and epochal struggles with Germanic and Russian states and examines Lithuania's struggle with the legacy of Soviet rule as it strives to establish democracy and economic prosperity.
Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe explains how ordinary people become involved in resistance and rebellion against powerful regimes. The book shows how a sequence of casual forces - social norms, focal points, rational calculation - operate to drive individuals into roles of passive resistance and, at a second stage, into participation in community-based rebellion organization. By linking the operation of these mechanisms to observable social structures, the work generates predictions about which types of community and society are most likely to form and sustain resistance and rebellion. The empirical material centres around Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance in both the 1940s and the 1987–91 period. Using the Lithuanian experience as a baseline, comparisons with several other Eastern European countries demonstrate the breadth and depth of the theory. The book contributes to both the general literature on political violence and protest, as well as the theoretical literature on collective action.
"This gripping and well-documented account of the history of the town of Vilnius and its surrounding region from the Polish ultimatum of March 1938, which forced Lithuania to open diplomatic relations with Poland, to the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in June 1940 is set against the evolution of Lithuania's relations with her neighbours during this crucial period. It is a major contribution to the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the subsequent evolution of Nazi Soviet relations. Prof. Liekis presents a remarkable history based on archival sources never before utilized in any English-language study. In revealing the geopolitical, ideological, economic, social and ethnic dimensions of an immense tragedy in the heart of Europe, the author provides a new perspective on the unraveling of a society and nation during the initial days of World War II as prelude to the most violent period in European history."--Publisher's description.
An American academic describes the breakup of the Soviet Union and the formation of an independent Latvia from the vantage point of Riga, where he was acting as an advisor to the Latvian Parliament and was a visiting faculty member at the time of the events. This description is unusual for several reasons—the author was based in Riga rather than Moscow or Leningrad, where most reporters lived, the work was written by someone who had access to the government, and the author was able to understand the local press and people. Background material on the Baltic countries and their relationship to the USSR is discussed. By 1991, the Soviet system was floundering, with people spending an inordinate amount of time standing in lines to cope with shortages. The final breakdown of the Soviet empire began in the Baltic Republics, where Baltic nationalism and Russian nationalism clashed. By the end of 1991, the Baltic countries and most of the former Soviet republics had declared independence. The Soviet Union has bequeathed to the successor states an infrastructure and ethos that makes the transition to democracy and a free market extremely difficult. The work will interest those who want to learn what really happened during the breakdown of the USSR and those who need to deal with the changes that continue to occur in the successor states.
Through interviews with leading participants on both sides, prominent Russian journalist Galina Sapozhnikova captures the political and human dimensions of betrayal and disillusionment that led to the collapse of the 20th century's greatest experiment in social engineering, and what happened to the men and women who struggled to destroy or save it. Termed "color" revolutions by the worldwide media as most were designated colors, these various movements developed in several societies in the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states during the early 2000s. In reality, they were US intelligence operations which covertly instigated, supported and infiltrated protest movements with a view to triggering “regime change” under the banner of a pro-democracy uprising . The objective was to manipulate elections, initiate violence, foment social unrest and use the resulting protest movement to topple an existing government in order to install a compliant pro-US government. What were the many tactics deployed in Lithuania, only now recognized as one of the first, to galvanize the popular uprising? Was Gorbachev's role duplicitous and anti-USSR? What was the role of Eugene Sharp in this grand show of historic transformation? Is nationalism a force to be welcomed or feared? How did the political shape-shifters act – the former Komsomol and Communist Party executives, who took high posts in the new “democratic” governments? What happened to the pro-democracy forces and to those they defeated in the aftermath? How has all this worked out for Lithuania? This book not only exposes the process, but sheds light on how these events play out, post regime-change. It is key to grasping the template that today underlies similar events in Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and likely elsewhere, going forward. The Lithuanian revolution may be key among them, a trial run for the August coup against Gorbachev in Moscow and the Soviet collapse that changed the course of world history. To date, The Lithuanian Conspiracy has been published under other titles in Lithuanian, Russian and Italian.
This book argues that – contrary to contemporary Lithuanian nationalist rhetoric – Lithuanian nationalism was modern and socially constructed in the period from the emergence of the Lithuanian national movement in the late nineteenth century to the birth of an independent state in 1918. The book brings into sharp focus those aspects of the history of Lithuania that earlier commentators had not systematically explored: it shows how, in this period, the nascent political elite fashioned its own and the emerging nation’s identity. Moreover, factors such as the elite’s social isolation, educational experience, marital strategies and narrowly based, fragmented and uncoordinated political activities were crucial factors in shaping identity and nation-building. It demonstrates how the elite was often in conflict with the peasantry, the religious establishment and other ethnic groups, and how critical considerations such as class, religion, displacement and ethnicity – rather than national ideology – were. The book’s conclusion that Lithuanian nationalism is a construct emerging from modern social forces is highly significant for understanding nationalism and contemporary political developments in Eastern Europe more generally.