The anti-religious course pursued by Khrushchev was toned down by the Brezhnev/Kosygin leadership, with most Orthodox churches being staffed by docile clergy often tied to the KGB. State propaganda tended to focus more on promoting "scientific atheism" rather than active persecution of believers. Nonetheless, minority faiths continued to be harassed relentlessly by the authorities, and particularly troubling to them was the continued resilience of Islam in the Central Asian republics. This was worsened by their geographical proximity to Iran, which fell under control of a fanatical Islamic government in 1979 that professed hostility to both the United States and the Soviet Union. While official figures put the number of believers at 9–10% of the population, authorities were nonetheless baffled at the continued widespread presence of religious belief in society, especially since by the start of the 1980s, the vast majority of Soviet citizens alive had no memory of tsarist times.