the West German government entered an agreement with the Soviet authorities which permitted between 6000 and 8000 people to emigrate to West Germany every year for the rest of the decade. As a result, almost 70000 ethnic Germans had left the Soviet Union by the mid-1980s. Similarly, Armenians achieved a small emigration. By the mid-1980s, over 15000 Armenians had emigrated. Russia has changed in the recent years largely in the social, economic, and political spheres. Migrations from Russian have become less forceful and primarily a result of free will that is expressed by the individual. Religious movements The religious movements in the USSR included Russian Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant movements. They focused on the freedom to practice their faith and resistance to interference by the state in their internal affairs. The Russian Orthodox movement remained relatively small. The Catholic movement in Lithuania was part of the larger Lithuanian national movement. Protestant groups which opposed the anti-religious state directives included the Baptists, the Seventh-day Adventists, and the Pentecostals. Similar to the Jewish and German dissident movements, many in the independent Pentecostal movement pursued emigration. National movements The national movements included the Russian national dissidents as well as dissident movements from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Armenia. Among the nations that lived in their own territories with the status of republics within the Soviet Union, the first movement to emerge in the 1960s was the Ukrainian movement. Its aspiration was to resist the Russification of Ukraine and to insist on equal rights and democratization for the republic. In Lithuania, the national movement of the 1970s was closely linked to the Catholic movement. Literary and cultural Several landmark examples of dissenting writers played a significant role for the wider dissident movement. These include the persecutions of Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Joseph Brodsky, as well as the publication of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In literary world, there were dozens of literati who participated in dissident movement, including Vasily Aksyonov, Arkadiy Belinkov, Leonid Borodin, Joseph Brodsky, Georgi Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, Aleksandr Galich, Venedikt Yerofeyev, Alexander Zinoviev, Lev Kopelev, Naum Korzhavin, Vladimir Maximov, Viktor Nekrasov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Varlam Shalamov. In the early Soviet Union, non-conforming academics were exiled via so-called Philosophers' ships. Later, figures such as cultural theorist Grigori Pomerants were among active dissidents. Other intersections of cultural and literary nonconformism with dissidents include the wide field