Word: stalins
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...following year. Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia similarly declared their independence, then formed a Transcaucasian Federation that even won de facto ; recognition from the Western allies, but here too the Red Army soon marched in and took over. And so things remained until World War II, when Joseph Stalin began trying to re-create the empire of the Czars -- and more. By attacking the Finns in 1939, he seized a slice of southern Finland; by making a deal with the Germans, he once again annexed the Baltic states. Then, after repelling the Nazi invasion, he established the Red Army in occupied...
...epicenter of the Soviet secessionist quake is in the Baltic states, which enjoyed 20 years of independence before being re-annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under a cynical deal between Stalin and Hitler. As a result, says Sajudis president Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania "is not seeking to establish independence, but working to restore it." Visiting the republic in January, Gorbachev tried to apply the brakes with an offer to create a new Soviet federation with increased autonomy for all republics. While every republic had a constitutional right to leave the Union, he said, a law on secession procedures first...
...group is more delighted with the new religious liberty than the mullahs who nurtured the Islamic faith during decades of persecution. "They used to shoot us," says a mullah at Tashkent's Tokhta Baitvacha mosque, which was closed in 1937 on Stalin's orders and reopened a year ago. "Now they don't interfere with us. A lot of young people come here these days...
...most of the few thousand full-time mullahs in the Soviet Union, their new sense of authority is a sharp break with the past. Despite assurances from Lenin and later Stalin of religious and cultural freedom for Soviet Muslims, the group suffered as much as Soviet Christians did during communist crackdowns, especially under Stalin. In 1932 the dictator announced a Five- Year Plan to eliminate religious belief. All but a tiny handful of the 26,000 mosques that flourished before 1917 were closed, destroyed or turned into nightclubs and warehouses. Thousands of mullahs were shot or sent to the Gulag...
Alongside freedom of worship, Muslim citizens of the Central Asian republics are becoming more assertive about culture. Many are demanding a return to the original Arabic script of their respective languages. The Cyrillic alphabet was forced on the Central Asian republics by Stalin in 1939 to cut Muslims off from their rich cultural heritage and to exacerbate relatively minor linguistic differences among the four main Turkic groups of the area. Today, privately run Arabic-language schools are flourishing in Tashkent and other major cities, while Tashkent's five Arabic-language middle schools are crammed to capacity. At the Tashkent...