Word: transcaucasia
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...other issues, their interests -- and thus their policies -- diverge. For one thing, Bush and Gorbachev are operating in entirely different domestic political environments. The man in the White House has strong backing from his citizens, while his counterpart in the Kremlin has received delegations of Muslims from Transcaucasia and Central Asia who are angry at the spectacle of infidels bombing an Islamic nation...
...emboldened enough to show a certain coolness toward Gorbachev, who was not always so favorably disposed to freedom of religion. Less than four years ago, the Soviet leader described Islam as the "enemy of progress and socialism." Allahshukur Pasha- zada, head of the Baku-based Muslim Religious Board for Transcaucasia, still resents the Soviet President's claim that Islamic fundamentalism played a role in Azerbaijan's upheaval. He led the Muslim ceremony in honor of the dead when 1.5 million people gathered at the Cemetery of the Martyrs above Baku to mourn the people killed in Azerbaijan during January...
...among other things, a new rail link between Soviet Turkmenistan and the northern Iranian city of Mashhad, which would help fulfill a longtime Moscow goal of greater access to the Persian Gulf. There were discussions, but no final accord, on reopening a gas pipeline from Iran to Soviet Transcaucasia, which was shut down in 1980. Moscow also announced that it would aid Iran in "strengthening ((its)) defense capability," but provided no details. The U.S. has made clear its opposition to large-scale shipments of Soviet arms to Iran; any such supplies would be viewed with even greater alarm by Iraq...
...recalls that "almost nobody was interested in religion" in the 1960s. Now, he reports, large numbers are becoming active believers, many of them young people. "None of the philosophies except the religious ones are able to satisfy men's needs," he maintains. The leader of the Muslim board for Transcaucasia, Allahshukur Pasha-zada, declares that until recently "freedom of conscience was on paper only." The pre-Gorbachev regimes, he says, "destroyed all the values of the people." Just a few years ago, no officials would have dared utter such words except in intimate conversations with friends...
Meanwhile, in the urban areas of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, Russian is steadily encroaching on native languages among young people. They have the option of attending classes taught in local languages, but they know?and their parents know?that upward and outward mobility in Soviet society depends on being