Word: kremlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet dissident Anatoli Shcharansky will join the ranks of cold war captives who have crossed the Glienicker Bridge to freedom. The news that Shcharansky and several others would be swapped for a number of East bloc spies in Western custody leaked to Bild Zeitung by what it called "Moscow Kremlin circles" and confirmed last week by European officials, caused an instant sensation in the West...
...Union (see box). His conviction on trumped-up charges of spying for the U.S. was widely regarded as a sign of crumbling detente. Moscow's apparent decision to free Shcharansky--and to telegraph it in advance--no doubt reflects more concern for propaganda than for human rights. But the Kremlin's willingness to swap a dissident whose freedom has been long sought by the West may also be an important sign that the Soviets are serious about improving superpower relations...
Indeed, diplomacy was breaking out on a number of East-West fronts last week. In Washington, President Reagan approved a proposed counteroffer to the Kremlin's sweeping new arms-reduction proposal, which calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The tentative U.S. reply, which must still be reviewed with U.S. allies before being presented at the Geneva arms-control talks, embraces Moscow's plan to eliminate U.S. and Soviet missiles from Europe but rejects the Soviet proposal that Britain and France halt any upgrading of their nuclear arsenals. It calls...
According to the New York-based Helsinki Watch Committee, an independent group that monitors Soviet human rights abuses, the Kremlin under Gorbachev has continued to ferret out and arrest the few dissidents and human rights activists who are not already in labor camps or psychiatric hospitals. And - while the Soviet Union permitted a few more Jews to emigrate in 1985 than it did in 1984--1,140, vs. 896--Jewish emigration still lags far behind its peak year of 1979, when 51,320 Jews were allowed to leave...
...same time, Muhammad was trying to build diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, a long-term aim of the Kremlin's foreign policy. Western diplomats tended to believe that Moscow had felt comfortable with him and was dismayed at the speed with which South Yemen dissolved into tribal warfare...