Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...violence did not cease with Stalin's death in 1953. In 1981 Pope John Paul barely escaped assassination. It is believed in the highest circles of the Vatican that Gorbachev's Kremlin predecessors were the masterminds, though the Soviets deny this. The reason for the attack, claims a ranking official of the Holy See, was that the Polish Pope refused to accept the division of Europe into East and West. "The East bloc," says this official, "realized he was a destabilizing factor...
Most important, 3,000 new churches have opened in the past nine months. However, Russian Orthodoxy's current 10,000 churches are a far cry from the 18,000 that existed when Stalin died, and just a fraction of the 54,000 before the Bolshevik Revolution. Ever since World War II, when Stalin fostered a , revival of Orthodoxy in order to enlist its support in the war effort, the Kremlin's policy has been not to liquidate the church but to infiltrate and control it. For that reason, the Soviet regime has always preferred docile Russian-led Orthodox and Protestant...
...battle for religious freedom is not yet won. The Supreme Soviet has still not taken up a long-anticipated revision of the repressive religious statute instituted by Stalin in 1929. There is no certainty whether, or when, parliament will scrap the hated law, which subjects all church activities to Communist control and forbids parish education. Nor, given the history of the U.S.S.R., is there certainty that rights proclaimed in speeches and laws will be honored by bureaucrats...
...million or so Catholics in the western Ukraine, whose plight is a key agenda item in this week's talks between Gorbachev and the Pope. Friendlier contacts, and a papal visit to the U.S.S.R., cannot occur unless this, the world's largest underground religious community, is restored. Under Stalin, all Ukrainian Catholic bishops were imprisoned and a fraudulent 1946 synod dissolved their jurisdictions, handing over 4,100 churches to Russian Orthodoxy. The majority of the Catholic priests rejected the takeover and either were arrested or went into hiding...
Even Franklin Roosevelt was posthumously excoriated for "giving away" Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta (rhymes with Malta). Harry Truman stood up to Stalin at Potsdam and hung tough over Iran, Berlin and Korea, but he still ended up being pilloried by a couple of junior Senators named Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary of State the dean of the "cowardly college of Communist containment." Two decades later, the New Nixon's policy of detente ran into a buzz saw of bipartisan anti-Soviet opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon went...