MOLDOVA….

President Petru Lucinschi asked Communist Party leader Vladimir Voronin (an ethnic Moldovan despite his Russian name) to form a new government. The Communists, who hold forty of 101 seats in the parliament, have the support of fifteen members of other parties and of the nine-member Popular Front, which had up to now proclaimed itself the staunchest and most fervently anticommunist faction in the country. Moldovans call the new political alignment a “Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,” a reference to Stalin’s alliance with Hitler in 1939-1941.