Question: How many people live where 66 of the people the Soviets didn't want to engage in conflict with were held hostage for 444 days in the late 1970s?

In April 1950, Stalin gave Kim permission to invade the South under the condition that Mao would agree to send reinforcements if they became needed. Kim met with Mao in May 1950. Mao was concerned that the Americans would intervene but agreed to support the North Korean invasion. China desperately needed the economic and military aid promised by the Soviets. Stalin made it clear that Soviet forces would not openly engage in combat, to avoid a direct war with the Americans. At that time, the Chinese were in the process of demobilizing half of the PLA's 5.6 million soldiers. However, Mao sent more ethnic Korean PLA veterans to Korea and promised to move an army closer to the Korean border. Once Mao's commitment was secured, preparations for war accelerated. <SEP> on 6 august 1940, estonia was annexed by the soviet union as the estonian ssr. the provisions in the estonian constitution requiring a popular referendum to decide on joining a supra-national body were ignored. instead the vote to join the soviet union was taken by those elected in the elections held the previous month. additionally those who had failed to do their "political duty" of voting estonia into the ussr, specifically those who had failed to have their passports stamped for voting, were condemned to death by soviet tribunals. the repressions followed with the mass deportations carried out by the soviets in estonia on 14 june 1941. many of the country's political and intellectual leaders were killed or deported to remote areas of the ussr by the soviet authorities in 1940–1941. repressive actions were also taken against thousands of ordinary people. <SEP> Fifty - two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, after a group of Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, who supported the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It stands as the longest hostage crisis in recorded history. The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic standoff between Iran and the United States of America. <SEP> Iran (/aɪˈræn/ or i/ɪˈrɑːn/; Persian: Irān – ایران‎‎ [ʔiːˈɾɒːn] ( listen)), also known as Persia (/ˈpɜːrʒə/ or /ˈpɜːrʃə/), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (جمهوری اسلامی ایران – Jomhuri ye Eslāmi ye Irān [d͡ʒomhuːˌɾije eslɒːˌmije ʔiːˈɾɒːn]), is a sovereign state in Western Asia. With 78.4 million inhabitants, Iran is the world's 17th-most-populous country. It is bordered to the northwest by Armenia, the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, and Azerbaijan; to the north by Kazakhstan and Russia across the Caspian Sea; to the northeast by Turkmenistan; to the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan; to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; and to the west by Turkey and Iraq. Comprising a land area of 1,648,195 km2 (636,372 sq mi), it is the second-largest country in the Middle East and the 18th-largest in the world. It is the only country that has both a Caspian Sea and an Indian Ocean coastline. Iran has long been of geostrategic importance because of its central location in Eurasia and Western Asia, and its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz. <SEP> spring 1989 saw the people of the soviet union exercising a democratic choice, albeit limited, for the first time since 1917, when they elected the new congress of people's deputies. just as important was the uncensored live tv coverage of the legislature's deliberations, where people witnessed the previously feared communist leadership being questioned and held accountable. this example fueled a limited experiment with democracy in poland, which quickly led to the toppling of the communist government in warsaw that summer – which in turn sparked uprisings that overthrew communism in the other five warsaw pact countries before the end of 1989, the year the berlin wall fell. these events showed that the people of eastern europe and the soviet union did not support gorbachev's drive to modernize communism; rather, they preferred to abandon it altogether.