ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1970s life changed dramatically and for the worse for the Soviet empire. Within the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, two massive fronts in the anti-Communist agitation opened. One was headed by the charismatic archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla; the other was led by the fiery leader of Islamic fundamentalism, Ayatollah Khomeini, who excited anti-Communist Muslims throughout Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as in other Islamic countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Islamic fundamentalism was a strange and elemental force that seemed, in its fanaticism and proclivity for violence, to resemble more an ideology than a religion, and indeed mainline Islamic leaders in the West eschewed and denounced it as such, as a perversion of Islam. On the Cold War front, the Soviets found a nightmare of another sort. With the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, the United States refocused its attention on the fundamental nature of the Cold War.
