Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 20 – Twenty-five
years ago today, Soviet forces carried out an act of state terrorism in the
Latvian capital of Riga, randomly firing into a crowd of demonstrators and
killing five; and 26 years ago from yesterday and today, they carried out another
such act in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, killing more than 130 in an
equally vicious and capricious way.
These two events, both then and now,
were overshadowed by others, the first by the killings at the Vilnius
television tower a week earlier and the second by the Karabakh conflict and the
emergence of popular fronts elsewhere in the USSR. But the events in Riga and
Baku may have done more to hasten the end of the USSR than any of the others.
That is because unlike most of the others
which could be explained as a defense of particular facilities or an effort to
control demonstrations, these two events showed that the Soviet state rested on
the arbitrary use of force alone – and because they did so, they stripped away
from Moscow whatever remnants of legitimacy it still had at that point.
These two acts are commemorated
every year in these two countries. (For memorial events about this held this
year, see trend.az/azerbaijan/society/2482329.html
and delfi.lv/reporter/news/witness/foto-na-domskoj-ploschadi-vspomnili-yanvarskie-barrikady-1991-goda.d?id=46958203.)
They should be remembered by all
people of good will everywhere as a reminder of what a truly horrific system
the Soviet Union was even at the end and of what Mikhail Gorbachev, winner of
the Nobel Peace Prize, did to his own population in his failed effort to keep
himself and the CPSU in power.
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