Word: pact
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...schools. Intense atheism campaigns in the 1920s and '30s led to the imprisonment and death of thousands of priests and the desecration of countless churches. In the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, workers boasted that they burned 20,000 icons in socialist competition. By 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 100 or so churches open throughout the Soviet Union, compared with 40,437 before the Revolution...
...historic turning point came when Hitler violated the pact, and his mechanized divisions drove deep into the Soviet Union. The all-but-crushed church called upon the faithful to defend Mother Russia and quickly raised 300 million rubles for the Red Army. In desperate need of a spiritual force that could bolster national solidarity, Stalin allowed the church more freedom. Since then, except for a strong antireligious period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church's right to peaceful coexistence with atheism has not been seriously threatened...
Only aid from the nations of the Communist economic pact (COMECON), notably the Soviet Union, keeps Viet Nam's economic crisis from sliding into debacle. Moscow, which has 8,000 advisers scattered through the country, is currently pouring $2.5 million a day into military and civilian aid projects, including a $1.8 billion hydroelectric and irrigation complex in Ha Son Binh (formerly Hoa Binh) province, a thermal power station, and completion of the Thang Long Bridge outside Hanoi, left unfinished by the Chinese withdrawal...
With these proposals, Moscow hopes to revive its dialogue with the West. Another aim of the "peace offensive" is to divide Washington from its allies. Last week's lengthy Warsaw Pact declaration, for example, spares the West European governments the criticism that is heaped on Washington...
Moscow's call for conferences received an equally cool welcome. The U.S. believes that summits are useful primarily to ratify agreements already reached. Otherwise, the fanfare surrounding such meetings leads to false hopes and possible misunderstandings. As for the Warsaw Pact proposals on arms control in Europe, a senior British diplomat suggested that the most effective means of lessening tensions would be for the Soviets to halt their deployment of SS-20 nuclear missiles...