LIBERTY OR UNION?

Asserts that the communist rule failed to replace ethnic and nationalist impulses in the republics that make up the Soviet Union. Economic failure of socialism; Lithuanians' opposition against being a part of the Soviet Union; Soviet leaders' acknowledgment of the illegitimacy of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin's pact by which the Baltic states were integrated into the Soviet Union; Options of Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev concerning the status of Lithuania.