Word: westerners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thaw added glimmers of hope for mutual understanding. The horrible truth about Stalin's camps, the arrests of dissidents, the abuses of psychiatry, the exile of Academician Andrei Sakharov, the presence of our troops in Afghanistan -- all lined up and blown out of proportion by reactionary elements in the Western press -- worked to destroy the heroic aura, reducing our image to that of an anti-Christ "empire of evil." However, thanks to the peaceful initiatives of our country in nuclear disarmament, glasnost and democratization, the anti-Christ image has been shattered...
...Soviet Union contains the biggest of these disputed churches, made up of millions of Catholic believers, mostly in the western Ukraine, who were forced into the Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin in 1946. Since then, many of these Ukrainians, who still consider the Pope their leader, have led an illegal underground existence. Despite Vatican overtures on their behalf, the Russian Orthodox Church resists having the Kremlin give legal recognition to the Catholics, arguing that they belong within Orthodoxy...
Other analysts point out that Gorbachev vitally needs the support of his country's 50 million Orthodox Christians in order to succeed in his far- reaching reforms. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest organized body in the Soviet Union, far exceeding the Communist Party in membership. Says one Western expert on the Soviet Union who attended the millennium: "This is a society facing social disintegration. They have a youth that is disaffected, an intolerable abortion rate and a serious alcohol and drug problem." Religious believers, points out this observer, "tend to be constructive members of society...
...battered is Iran? The question is being asked more and more frequently these days, not only in Arab chanceries but also in Washington and the capitals of Western Europe, as Tehran attempts to cope with a series of unexpected setbacks. After nearly eight years of war with Iraq, Iran suddenly finds itself on the defensive, forced to regroup and rebuild after decisive defeats at the hands of the Iraqi army. The battlefield losses in turn have increased tensions between radical and moderate factions among the ruling mullahs and led the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini to bestow his title of commander...
...because they are in reality so small. But because the office looms so large. Nowhere in the Western world is the head of government more deified than in the U.S. And nowhere else is the office so feeble. Nowhere else, in other words, is the gap between its real and imagined powers so great. This sets up an impossible disparity between expectation and delivery that makes any prospective President look inadequate...