Word: belyaev
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...overwhelmingly located in the five Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan. Among some anxious citizens, the discovery has touched off premonitions of disaster, as republic after republic is shaken by unrest, often with religious overtones. After Soviet troops were called in last January to quell bloody rioting in Azerbaijan, Igor Belyaev, a prominent Soviet commentator on Muslim affairs, warned that "Iran has threatened the Soviet Union with an Islamic conflagration." President Mikhail Gorbachev argued that "Islamic fundamentalism" was a major factor in the rioting against minority Armenians in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku...
Neither Gorbachev nor Belyaev is exactly on target in Azerbaijan. Fundamentalist Islam had very little to do with the rapid growth of the republic's Popular Front before the crushing intervention of the Soviet army in mid-January; the main issues were autonomy from Moscow and an end to the Communist Party monopoly of power. But elsewhere, profound Islamic forces -- some of them violent -- have begun to shake up the status quo in response to Gorbachev's decision to allow freedom of conscience throughout the Soviet Empire. Examples...
Such fears buttress suspicions among non-Muslim Soviets elsewhere that their country, tied with Turkey as the fifth largest Muslim community in the world (after Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India), is in fact on the brink of the Islamic conflagration that commentator Belyaev feared. Those suspicions are unfair to the vast majority of Soviet Muslims, who may be nationalistic but do not embrace any brand of vengeful fundamentalism. As Ilios Ibragimov, a Tadzhik truck driver in Dushanbe, put it, "Those people who caused the damage and looted, they were fools, bad people." The question is whether Mikhail Gorbachev will also...
Naturally, Khrushchev takes none of the blame for the fiasco. Three years ago he found a scapegoat in Kazakhstan Party Boss Nikolai Belyaev, fired him for his "errors." Last week Belyaev's successor, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, was similarly bounced-for "lapses" in his work. For good measure, Moscow also purged the former Premier of the territory from the local party's Central Committee...
...speak the truth to you here, Comrades Kunaev and Belyaev, they .will applaud you in Kazakhstan, and you will tell them there was a meeting of the Central Committee and everything went off fine. Actually, things are bad, very...