Baltic States

Riga, Latvia.-- There is an external problem and an internal one in Latvia. The first is proximity to Russia, with a feeble history of independence from Russia. The second is Latvia's minority Russian population, which native Latvians are reluctant to assimilate and whose political interests are supported by Moscow.The Latvians resist the minority because of their justified grievances against Russia, which invaded and annexed Latvia in 1940 as a consequence of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement.

Beverly B. Byron plopped into a chair behind her desk in the late afternoon Monday and looked forward to at least attempting to catch herbreath.Late summer is supposed to be one of those infrequent times of the year when the pace slows for members of the U.S. House of Representatives like Byron, who presides over Maryland's sixth district.But for Byron, a Frederick resident, the stop at her district office on North Court Street was practically the first respite in a day that combined keeping abreast of a military coup in the Soviet Union with an annual Carroll tour.

MOSCOW -- A solemn Mikhail S. Gorbachev appeared on national television last night to inform his countrymen of "the most profound changes in the history of our state."Russia and two other republics agreed yesterday to sign the newly drafted union treaty on Aug. 20, said Mr. Gorbachev, who held out hopethat some of the resisting republics would reconsider.The treaty would transform the country into a loose federation and give more power to the republics, scrapping a 1922 charter that created the Soviet state.

Four R'sI read that the state has come up with a way to save Patterson High School by dividing it into four academies: humanities, fine arts, technical education and career preparation.This sounds vaguely familiar to me. From 1927 to 1931 I was a student at Forest Park High School, the first coeducational high school in Baltimore City.Students there were offered four courses: general, academic, technical and commercial.It boggles my mind that it has taken all these years of trial and error for the school system to realize that what we were offered 63 years ago was a system that really works.

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine -- President Bush pushed hard yesterday for the Soviet central government to formally release the Baltic republics today.White House officials made clear that if the union's Supreme Soviet votes as expected today to grant independence to Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, U.S. recognition would quickly follow."

On Monday, five days after the collapse of the coup by the Soviet hard-liners, a local Estonian policeman stood guard at the closed Communist party headquarters in Tallinn, the Estonian capital.Meanwhile, the Latvian Foreign Minister Janis Jurkans, alonwith his Lithuanian and Estonian counterparts, was in Western Europe signing diplomatic agreements with Norway, Germany, France and other countries re-establishing diplomatic relations. And in Lithuania the government was issuing Lithuanian passports to its citizens and visas to foreign travelers.

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- Pope John Paul II takes his first step on former Soviet soil here tomorrow, with a long-awaited visit that finally will consecrate the cultural and political independence of this tiny Baltic nation.The pope's trip is not simply a religious milestone for Lithuanians, for whom the church was a rallying point of national identity and opposition to communist rule."The Catholic church was the main power trying to fight for human souls in every possible way," said Vytautas Landsbergis, the musician who led the independence movement here and became free Lithuania's first leader.

MOSCOW -- Russian leader Boris N. Yeltsin, flying to Tallinn yesterday in a dramatic defense of Baltic independence bids against Soviet troops, joined the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in asking the United Nations to call an emergency international conference on the future of the Baltic republics.Their appeal proposed that the U.N.-approved Jan. 15 deadline for Iraq to pull its troops out of Kuwait be extended, permitting the Baltic conference to take place in the interim.The four presidents also jointly condemned the Soviet army's violent assault on Lithuanian broadcast facilities early yesterday morning in which Lithuanian officials say 14 people died and 144 were injured.

MOSCOW -- A half-century of often brutal rule from Moscow came to an end yesterday when what remains of the Soviet Union followed the example of some 50 other countries and officially recognized the independence of the three Baltic republics.The just-created State Council took only 30 minutes of its first meeting in the Kremlin to acknowledge the restored statehood of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the latest fruit of the accelerated political change following last month's failed Soviet coup.

WASHINGTON -- With the bloody Soviet crackdown in Lithuania serving as a backdrop, Representative Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md.-3rd, is once again pushing a measure that would tie normalized trade relations between the Soviet Union and the United States to independence for the Baltic states."