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Vilnius, 7 December 1989

The Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR voted on 7 December 1989 to delete Article 6 of the republic’s constitution, the clause guaranteeing the Communist Party’s leading political role: 243 in favour of deletion, one to keep it, 39 abstentions.

It then adopted replacement wording permitting political parties, public organizations and movements to form and operate under Lithuanian law, by 259 to nothing with 19 abstentions.

First inside the Union

Lithuania became the first constituent republic of the Soviet Union to remove the party’s constitutional monopoly and authorize a multiparty system. Several Soviet-bloc states in Eastern Europe had already removed comparable privileges, so the claim holds only inside the USSR — and the all-Union constitution was untouched by the vote.

Mikhail Gorbachev opposed a rapid abandonment of the guaranteed role at all-Union level. The amendment cleared the legal barrier to new parties competing in Lithuania’s election of 24 February 1990.

A parliamentary act, not a song

The listing files this under the Singing Revolution. The event was a constitutional vote in a legislature, not a festival or a street demonstration.

It ended the party’s legal monopoly, not the Communist Party of Lithuania, which took a separate decision on 19–20 December to break with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Nor did it declare independence: Lithuania restored that on 11 March 1990.

Cape Town, 2 May 1990

Delegations of the South African government and the African National Congress formally sat down at the Groote Schuur presidential residence in Cape Town on 2 May 1990. State President F. W. de Klerk led one side; ANC deputy president Nelson Mandela led the other.

The opening session ran about four hours. Each side set out what it regarded as the obstacles to substantive negotiation: political prisoners, returning exiles, security laws, the state of emergency, political violence and the ANC’s armed struggle.

Talks about talks

This was preliminary — clearing the way for constitutional negotiations rather than conducting them. A communiqué called the exchanges open and straightforward and set an agenda for continuing.

Getting there had taken a detour: talks planned for 11 April were suspended by the ANC after police killed demonstrators at Sebokeng, and Mandela and de Klerk met on 5 April to reschedule for 2–4 May. On 4 May the parties issued the Groote Schuur Minute.

Two corruptions in the listing

The entry’s “05-02-4” and the leading “4 –” in its title look like a mangled 2–4 May date range. And its linked topic is the African Union, an organization launched in 2002 with no connection to these talks.

One further caution: the ANC did not suspend its armed struggle at Groote Schuur. That commitment came in the Pretoria Minute of 6 August 1990.

Palais des Nations, 17 May 1990

At its fourteenth plenary meeting in Geneva on 17 May 1990 — the last day of the 7–17 May session — the Forty-third World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA43.24, approving the Tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.

The adopted ICD-10 removed the ICD-9 diagnostic category of homosexuality per se and stated that sexual orientation alone should not be treated as a disorder.

Adopted in 1990, in force in 1993

The resolution specified that ICD-10 would come into effect on 1 January 1993. The vote approved a future international classification; it did not edit a single operational list worldwide that evening, and member states implemented it through their own systems afterward.

The recommendations behind it came from the International Conference for the Tenth Revision, which met in Geneva from 26 September to 2 October 1989.

What stayed in the manual

ICD-10 kept the F66 categories, including “ego-dystonic sexual orientation,” “sexual maturation disorder” and “sexual relationship disorder,” even while stating that orientation alone was not a disorder.

The decision also concerned sexual orientation, not gender identity: ICD-10 continued to classify several gender-identity diagnoses.

And it was separate from the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from DSM-II in 1973, seventeen years earlier.

Moscow, 19 May 1990

After four days of negotiations in Moscow, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker announced on 19 May 1990 that the United States and the Soviet Union had reached full agreement on a bilateral chemical-weapons accord. His counterpart was Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

The plan would cut each country’s chemical-agent stockpile to a level described that day as 20 percent of the existing U.S. holding. Baker also announced that the United States would stop producing chemical weapons immediately.

The numbers in the text

The formal ceiling was 5,000 metric agent tons per party by 31 December 2002, with at least 50 percent of each declared stockpile destroyed by 31 December 1999 and destruction beginning no later than 31 December 1992.

That is not elimination. Each superpower could still retain thousands of tonnes of agent, with deeper cuts left to a future multilateral convention.

Announced, then signed, then never in force

19 May completed the political negotiation; it was not the signing. Presidents Bush and Gorbachev signed the agreement in Washington on 1 June 1990.

Its production and destruction obligations were conditional on entry into force, and the agreement was never ratified by both parties. Later stockpile destruction ran under the Chemical Weapons Convention instead, which entered into force in 1997.

One filing error worth naming: the corpus routes this entry to a page on U.S. nuclear weapons. It is a chemical-weapons event.

Paris, 19 November 1990

Heads of state or government from all 34 participating states of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe assembled in Paris on 19 November 1990 for a summit running through the 21st.

On the first morning, the 22 NATO and Warsaw Pact countries signed the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe at the Élysée Palace and issued a joint declaration affirming that Europe’s era of division and confrontation was over.

The Charter came on the 21st

The summit culminated two days later with the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, whose signatories committed themselves to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The Charter also began converting the CSCE from a conference process into a standing institution, adding recurring summits and ministerial councils and three permanent bodies: a Secretariat, an Office for Free Elections and a Conflict Prevention Centre.

Counting, and filing

The listing describes “Canada, the United States, and 32 European states.” The correct figure is 34 participating states in total, of which the CFE signatories were a 22-state subset.

The body was still called the CSCE in 1990; it was renamed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1995.

The corpus also routes this entry to a page about Canada’s Leader of the Official Opposition, which has no connection to the summit.

18 March 1990

The listing carries only the year. The vote took place on 18 March 1990, when East German voters freely and secretly elected all 400 members of the tenth Volkskammer — the GDR’s first and only free parliamentary election.

About 12.4 million people were eligible and 93.4 percent voted, choosing among 19 parties and five electoral alliances across 15 constituencies under proportional representation with no electoral threshold.

The polls were wrong

The CDU-led Alliance for Germany, campaigning for rapid reunification, the Deutsche Mark and a social-market economy, took about 48 percent and 192 of the 400 seats — 163 CDU, 25 German Social Union, four Democratic Awakening.

The SPD, which had led many pre-election polls, finished second with 88 seats; the SED-successor PDS took 66. Alliance 90, drawn from the opposition movement that had driven the revolution, won 12.

What the vote was, and was not

The pre-1990 GDR is often called a single-party system. It was an SED dictatorship with a sham multiparty parliament: four subordinated bloc parties and SED-controlled mass organizations also held seats.

Pluralism was established before the election, not legalized by the new parliament afterward — competing parties had to exist for 18 March to happen at all.

The result gave a majority for fast monetary and political union without itself reunifying Germany. The new Volkskammer convened on 5 April and elected Lothar de Maizière on 12 April.

After midnight, 13 January 1991

Soviet tanks, armoured vehicles and armed troops attacked the Vilnius Television Tower and the Lithuanian Radio and Television headquarters shortly after midnight on 13 January 1991, firing on and driving into crowds of unarmed defenders.

The Vilnius studio stopped broadcasting at 2:09 a.m., though the tower relayed pictures for another eight minutes. Lithuanian television was back on air from Kaunas at 2:20 a.m., and Lithuanian Radio began transmitting from the parliament building at 4:23 a.m.

Parliament did not fall

Soviet forces took the tower and the broadcast headquarters. They did not take the Supreme Council, which kept working behind crowds and improvised barricades.

Around 4 a.m., 82 members of the Supreme Council assembled and unanimously adopted emergency decisions — the elected government demonstrably still functioning.

The numbers and dates the listing fixes too firmly

Thirteen civilians died during or immediately after the assault. The standard total of 14 includes Vytautas Koncevičius, wounded that night, who died on 18 February.

“702 injured” is not consistently supported. The Lithuanian criminal judgment summarized by the European Court of Human Rights enumerates 740 bodily-harm victims — 16 severely injured and 724 with medium or mild harm — while the parliament’s own historical account speaks of about 1,000 people suffering traumas of varying severity.

Lithuania also restored its independence on 11 March 1990, not in February 1991; 16 February commemorates the Act of Independence of 1918.

4:00 a.m., 24 February 1991

The main U.S.-led coalition ground offensive began from Saudi Arabia at 4:00 a.m. local time on 24 February 1991, attacking north into occupied Kuwait and into southern Iraq.

Marine and Arab coalition formations pushed toward Kuwait City while VII Corps, with the British 1st Armoured Division, began the western “left hook” into Iraq, aimed at engaging the Republican Guard and cutting Iraqi withdrawal routes. An official U.S. Army history records French scouts entering Iraq at 1:00 a.m., three hours ahead of the French main body.

The obstacle belt gave way faster than planned

Coalition forces breached barbed wire, minefields, antitank ditches and oil-filled fire trenches more quickly than planners had expected, and Iraqi troops began surrendering in large numbers within hours.

The 2nd Marine Division captured the Iraqi 9th Tank Battalion substantially intact — 35 T-55 tanks and more than 5,000 men.

Where the first day ended

By the close of 24 February the I Marine Expeditionary Force had advanced about 20 miles into Kuwait and taken nearly 10,000 Iraqi prisoners.

The listing describes only a crossing into Kuwait. Major coalition formations drove into southern Iraq at the same time, as the deliberate western turning movement.

Kuwait City was not liberated that day either: coalition and Kuwaiti forces entered it on 27 February.

Zagreb and Ljubljana, 25 June 1991

At a joint session of its three chambers in Zagreb on 25 June 1991, the Croatian Sabor adopted a Constitutional Decision declaring Croatia sovereign and independent and initiating separation from the other Yugoslav republics and the federation.

In Ljubljana the same day, all chambers of the Slovenian Assembly adopted the Basic Constitutional Charter and its implementing legislation, stating that Slovenia would no longer be part of the SFRY and assuming powers previously exercised by federal institutions.

Beginning a procedure, not completing one

The Croatian decision initiated a process rather than asserting that every legal tie had already been cut, and it began the search for international recognition.

Slovenia’s acts went further in one respect: they recognized Croatia as a sovereign state and international legal entity, and terminated the mandates of Slovenian delegates in the federal Yugoslav assembly.

Both rested on earlier votes — Slovenia’s December 1990 plebiscite, backed by 1,289,369 voters or 88.5 percent of the whole electorate, and Croatia’s May 1991 referendum, at 93.24 percent of those voting.

Then the army moved

Slovenia’s formal public proclamation ceremony followed on 26 June. Yugoslav People’s Army units then moved toward the border crossings, and open fighting began early on 27 June.

Nothing was settled quickly. After the Brioni Declaration, implementation was suspended for three months, and Croatia severed its remaining state-legal ties on 8 October 1991.

Fifteen minutes to close a bloc's economic council

On 28 June 1991, representatives of Comecon's nine remaining member states met in Budapest, Hungary, and signed a protocol terminating the organization. It was the council's 46th session and its last.

The formal proceedings lasted approximately 15 minutes. Hungary's minister of international economic relations, Béla Kádár, opened the session and said Comecon had failed to adapt to regional change.

Only ministers attended the final meeting, and Vietnam was represented by its ambassador.

Nine signatories, three of them outside Europe

The signatories were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam were still members at the close, so this was not solely an Eastern European body when it shut down.

The members had already agreed in principle in January 1991 to wind the council up. The fall of Eastern Europe's one-party communist governments and members' moves toward market-priced, hard-currency trade had made it unworkable.

Wrong city, wrong dissolution

The listing places the signing in Moscow, Russia. It happened in Budapest. Moscow is where the Warsaw Pact's final dissolution protocol was signed, three days later on 1 July 1991.

This was also not the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which came in December 1991. The Soviet Union was one of the nine states signing Comecon away.

The protocol did not switch the organization off that morning. Comecon's legal existence was to terminate when its charter was declared invalid, specified as 90 days after 28 June, and a liquidation mechanism was created to dispose of assets and settle financial and legal obligations.

Two documents, one afternoon

On 24 July 1991 the Government of India tabled a Statement on Industrial Policy in both houses of Parliament. It was a Ministry of Industry document. Later the same day, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh presented the 1991–92 budget.

The listing credits Singh with announcing the industrial policy. He did not. Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao held additional charge of the Industry portfolio, and the statement came from his ministry.

Singh's budget speech referred to industrial-policy changes that “we have announced” and placed them inside a wider package of fiscal, trade, exchange-rate, investment and financial reforms.

Licences became the exception, not the rule

The statement abolished industrial licensing for all projects except a specified list covering strategic, hazardous, environmental, social and luxury-consumption concerns. Eighteen industries stayed under compulsory licensing in the original annex, and small-scale-sector reservations remained.

It authorized automatic approval of foreign direct investment up to 51% equity in designated high-priority industries, and allowed majority foreign equity up to the same level in export-oriented trading companies.

It also ended pre-entry scrutiny of investment decisions by large MRTP companies and proposed removing prior central-government approval for expansion, new undertakings, mergers, amalgamations and takeovers.

Opening up with two weeks of imports in the vault

India was in a near-default balance-of-payments crisis. Foreign-currency assets stood at about US$1.1 billion in June 1991, barely two weeks of import cover, while short-term credit and non-resident deposits drained away.

Calling 24 July the beginning of liberalisation is interpretive. Exchange-rate adjustments had already been made on 1 and 3 July, trade-policy changes were underway, and partial industrial deregulation dated back to the 1980s.

The package was decisive all the same: by nightfall, delicensing, foreign-investment and MRTP reform were public government policy, with implementing press notes to follow, including the Industry Ministry's 14 August procedures for foreign investment and technology agreements.

Decree No. 169, signed at the Kremlin

On 6 November 1991, at the Moscow Kremlin, RSFSR president Boris Yeltsin signed Decree No. 169, “On the Activities of the CPSU and the Communist Party of the RSFSR.”

It terminated the activity of both organizations within the RSFSR and ordered their organizational structures dissolved. Central and regional executive authorities were told to implement it immediately and to transfer party property in Russia to the state.

The same document instructed state bodies and prosecutors not to persecute citizens merely because they had belonged to either party.

Its stated grounds were the August coup

The decree explicitly invoked the failed coup of 19–21 August 1991, accused the CPSU leadership of fusing party and state power, and cited alleged registration defects as legal grounds for acting.

It was not the first post-coup move against the party. Decrees issued in August had already suspended the Russian party, froze accounts and placed party property under state control.

The Soviet Union itself still formally existed on 6 November 1991.

Why “ban” is the wrong word

The operative language terminated activity and dissolved organizational structures rather than pronouncing a ban, and its reach did not hold. On 30 November 1992 Russia's Constitutional Court upheld dissolution of the parties' leadership structures but held that territorially organized primary party organizations could not constitutionally be dissolved wholesale.

The court also invalidated the property transfer insofar as the property was party-owned or its ownership was undetermined.

One relationship is routinely reversed in accounts of this decree: the CPSU was the union-level organization, and the Communist Party of the RSFSR was its Russian component, not its parent.