countries of Eastern Europe, to your colleagues in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, in the name of preserving the imperial image, of great power status in the old Soviet meaning of the word, he would say that the question for him was absurd."19 In reality, however, in the context of 1985-88, "the freedom" that Gorbachev had "given" to Eastern Europeans meant stagnation and preservation of the "status quo."

Lévesque points out several reasons for Soviet "immobilism" with regard to Eastern Europe, stressing politics, ideology and personality.20 But perhaps there was one more reason for Moscow's "neglect" of the regions: Soviet foreign policy was focused on the more important task of achieving détente with the Western powers, for this was the level of "grand diplomacy" where Gorbachev's skills of persuasion and compromise shone brightly and where spectacular breakthroughs could be achieved. By contrast, messy East-Central European affairs could be a bottomless pit and the communist apparatchiks there were too far below him for him to want to be bothered with them.21

This, however, does not exhaust the problem of the glaring disconnection between the new approaches of the Soviet leadership towards the West and the lack of any policy towards its allies in Eastern Europe. In the past the Kremlin had acted differently at least once. In 1953, when Stalin's successors rapidly turned from the near-war situation to "détente," they simultaneously sought to change regimes, leadership and policies in the Eastern European countries.22 Subsequently however, Soviet leaders never systematically coordinated the "great power" and "alliance" levels of their foreign policy. Neither Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1959, nor Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1971-72, cared much about how Soviet allies felt about the dramatic rapprochement between the USSR and the Western countries and neither did anything to prepare those allies for the new policy. Against this background, Gorbachev's approach was hardly surprising, but it was not the only possible course. In an interesting episode, soon after Gorbachev came to power, a hard-line senior official of the CC International Department, Oleg Rakhmanin, decided that it was time "to discipline the socialist camp." According to the recollections of one of his colleagues, everybody in the Department had long known that the bloc had become a mess: "Kádár was doing whatever he wanted, Honecker was hiding some things from us, making deals with West Germany, trading with them, accepting loans, letting people travel, nobody knew what he was doing; the Poles flirted with the Americans and planned to purchase Boeings instead of our airplanes."23 Rakhmanin tried to call the allies "to order" and published two articles to that effect in Pravda. "Liberal-minded" people in Eastern European communist establishments complained about them to their Moscow colleagues. When Gorbachev learned about the incident, he grew angry, and soon Rakhmanin was sacked.24 When various Eastern European politicians later approached Gorbachev or his advisers,

seeking support for their plans to change the political status quo, they came back empty-handed. At the same time, Gorbachev never tried to undercut conservative Eastern European leaders on their home turf; for instance, he remained silent on the Prague Spring during his visit to Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1987.25 Although he had sharp disagreements with Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, in public he avoided any criticism of him and even presented him with Soviet awards. In Hungary, it was not Gorbachev's actions, but the "Gorbachev effect," that caused Janós Kádár to retire.26 The Soviet leader's meticulous non-interference, against the growing tension in Eastern Europe, was, in retrospect, a lucky chance for the anti-communist reformers there, but a gross miscalculation from the viewpoint of traditional Soviet political interests.

By 1988, Gorbachev's foreign policy had begun to put heavy strains on the status quo within the Warsaw Treaty Organization. In particular, Moscow initiated moves for "getting around the Americans" and for "smothering" Western European members of NATO "in [a] tender embrace" by building up contacts and building down the military stand-off in Europe. The Soviets used new, bold methods to advance the traditional goal of fomenting divisions inside NATO,27 the boldest and most farreaching of which were unilateral reductions of Soviet troops in Central Europe.28

29

Whatever Gorbachev's intentions, in terms of power relations, his foreign policy was ruinous. NATO, despite its porous and fragile appearance, remained strong, and Western Europeans were not prepared "to end the cold war" with the Soviet Union without American consent. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Soviet presence in Eastern and Central Europe were rapidly eroding. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had no coherent policy at all for the Warsaw Part. Adopted in July 1987, the new doctrine of the Warsaw Pact, a carbon copy of the Soviet one, undermined the fundamentals of Soviet military presence in the satellite countries. Instead of rejuvenating and reforming the alliance, this doctrine introduced new elements of instability. As with every outdated and unpopular institution, the Warsaw Pact ran the risk of crumbling during rapidly changing times.

But even more important for Soviet behavior and ultimately for events in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 were domestic changes in the Soviet political and cultural environment. The beginning of radical de-Stalinization and ideological revisions from the top opened the possibility for a split between conservative and reformist elements in the party establishment, and for an across-the-board attack on the foundations of Soviet foreign policy since 1917. Ironically, it was the savy Janós Kádár who, on the basis of Hungarian experience, concluded in 1987 that Gorbachev would bring a catastrophe upon the USSR through his domestic policies.30 But, paradoxically, a majority in the Politburo, the Central Committee, and state apparatus worried more about the allies, rather than about domestic

destabilization. They supported moderate reformism, but feared that radical de-Stalinization could break up the Soviet bloc and throw Eastern Europe into turmoil as had occurred after Khrushchev's 20th Party Congress speech in 1956. An important debate inside the Politburo occurred in March 1988 as a result of the so-called "Nina Andreeva letter.' "31 KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov warned about "the meltdown [of Soviet] mentality." In a Politburo session, the spokesman of ideological conservatives, Yegor Ligachev, for the first time raised the specter of disaster for the communist "camp:❞

Arguably, we will muddle through, will survive the attacks [of anti-Stalinist forces in the Soviet mass media], but there are socialist countries, the world communist movement-what to do about them? Would we risk breaking apart this powerful support that had always existed side by side with our socialist countries? History has become [the tool of] politics and, when we deal with it, we should think not only about the past, but also about the future.32

Gorbachev ridiculed as panic-mongers those who blamed him for destruction of "what had been built by Stalin."33 And Shevardnadze declared that "primitivism and intellectual narrow-mindedness had prevented Khrushchev from implementing to the end the line of the Twentieth Party Congress." He bluntly said that, so far as "the communist and working class movement today"34 was concerned, there was not much to rescue. As to the socialist bloc "take for instance Bulgaria, take the old leadership of Poland, take the current situation in the German Democratic Republic, in Romania. Is it socialism?"35

On 18 May 1988, a "think tank" expert and consultant to the CC International Department, Vyacheslav Dashichev, published an article in Literary Gazette with the first reassessment of the Cold War. He wrote that both sides, not only the United States, had contributed to the origins of confrontation. Among other points, he criticized Soviet "hegemonism" in relations with the countries of Eastern Europe and China, and blamed the Brezhnev leadership for renewing the arms race and thus failing to prevent the collapse of détente in the 1970s.36

During 1988, Gorbachev completely discarded the old "revolutionary-imperial" basis for Soviet foreign policy, particularly its key concepts of "class struggle" and bipolarity.37 In October, Chernyaev, observing the meeting between Gorbachev and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, wrote in his diary: "I felt physically that we are entering a new world, where class struggle, ideology, and, in general, polarity and enmity are no longer decisive. And something all-human is taking the upper hand."38 By that time the full panoply of international principles of "the new thinking" included: freedom of choice, mutual respect of each other's values, balance of interests, reunification of Europe in an "all-European house," a nuclear-free world, and renunciation of force.39 In late October, Gorbachev

began preparations to deliver his principles to the world from the most salient podium, the General Assembly of the United Nations. He told his "brain trust"-Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, Dobrynin, Falin and Chernyaev-to prepare a speech that would be an answer to Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton College (Missouri) in March 1946. It "should be an anti-Fulton-Fulton in reverse," he said. "We should present our worldview philosophy based on the results of the last three years. We should stress the process of demilitarization and humanization of our thinking." 40 The concept of "antiFulton" supposed, of course, the dismantling of the Iron Curtain dividing Eastern Europe from the West.

One can hardly overestimate the huge pressure exerted on Gorbachev by the USSR's economic and financial crisis that reached grave proportions by the end of 1988. In November, the Soviet leader cited the Soviet military burden ("two and a half times as much as the United States spends on defense") to obtain approval for the decision on unilaterally withdraw half a million elite Soviet troops from Central Europe.41 In a later December Politburo session, he admitted: "In no other country is [the military burden] so bad. Perhaps only in poor countries, where half of their budget goes to military spending."42 Only future research may determine what percentage of the Soviet gross national product was spent on the Cold War by the end of the 1980s; figures vary from 10 percent of direct costs to 70 percent of indirect costs related to military, defense, international assistance and propaganda needs.43

44

The importance of structural factors notwithstanding, the role of new ideas, the euphoria of "new thinking," is crucial to understanding the attitudes of Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and others around them toward the problem of a divided Europe. It would go too far to say that "realist" calculations were completely absent from their minds. For instance, according to Shakhnazarov, he was "absolutely convinced" well before 1989 that the GDR would unite one day with the Federal Republic,45 and he argued about it with leading Soviet experts on Germany, among them Vladimir Semyonov and Yuli Kvitsinsky. In November 1987, Vyacheslav Dashichev, head of the scientific-consultative council at the Foreign Ministry for the affairs of "socialist states," presented to the ministry a report arguing that it was impossible to "open" the process of European integration without re-opening the issue of German reunification. Dashichev argued that reunification would leave NATO without a cause and would help ease the US out of Europe. It is hard to say whether these unrealistic assumptions found much support. The "realist" conclusion for other, more sober-minded analysts could be very different: if reunification of Germany was inevitable, then "other countries of Eastern Europe would become independent, and would be more attracted to the West." The question was when, and at what price? 47

Not a trace of these discussions surfaced during the crucial debates on the conceptual reformulation of Soviet

foreign policy in July-August 1988. I was present at a special emergency conference of Soviet foreign affairs specialists convened by Shevardnadze, and was struck by the fact that there was still a virtual "taboo” that precluded all speakers, even behind closed doors, from frankly talking about the potential implications of the German question for Central and Eastern Europe. In his crusade for a new universalist thinking, Gorbachev dispensed with Stalin's cynical logic of Realpolitik without supplying any moderate, "enlightened" version of "realism." For Gorbachev's predecessors from Stalin to Andropov, "realism," which was based on strength, coercion, and balance of power, was like mother's milk; they cared about power and empire as much, if not more, as they did about the "socialist" perspective and "proletarian internationalism." The stalwart from the past, long-time Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, admitted privately his "mistake" in 1985 of supporting Gorbachev. He called Gorbachev and his advisers "the Martians" for their ignorance of the laws of Realpolitik. "I wonder how puzzled the US and other NATO countries must be," he confessed to his son. "It is a mystery for them why Gorbachev and his friends in the Politburo cannot comprehend how to use force and pressure for defending their state interests."48

By the end of 1988, it was already clear that the changes in Soviet domestic and foreign policy were causing strains in the Soviet alliance so severe that they could no longer be ignored. The Politburo discussed contingencies, and in late January 1989, Gorbachev assigned the Politburo Commission on Foreign Policy (created earlier for other purposes and headed by Alexander Yakovlev) to work in collaboration with various agencies and "think tanks" on contingencies regarding future developments in East-Central Europe. Yakovlev solicited a number of analytical papers from academic and state institutions: most of them predicted an overall crisis of the alliance. There were frank conclusions that Soviet allies were already quietly rejecting "socialism" and were "in a powerful magnetic field" of the West. Looking at scenarios, a memorandum from the Institute of Economics of World Socialist System (IEMSS) concluded that if the ruling parties did not make concessions to the opposition forces, they faced a "political eruption;" another predicted "a most acute social-political conflict with an unfathomable. outcome." However, the thrust of all papers, particularly those from the IEMSS, headed by Oleg Bogomolov, opposed any form of Soviet intervention in East-Central Europe. The typical conclusion was that any politicalmilitary intervention did not guarantee success, but instead might trigger a chain-reaction of violence and lead to the self-destruction of the Soviet bloc.49

Yakovlev, and Gorbachev himself, were very much inclined to heed this advice. One reason for the policy of non-interference was best put by Fedor Burlatsky: "We have given our allies so much bad advice in the past that we now hesitate to give them good advice."50 The guilty conscience of 1956 and particularly of the suppression of

the Prague Spring in 1968 weighed on the Gorbachevites as part of their generational experience. Gorbachev did not suffer from the trauma of 1968 as some of his intellectual advisers did. But his own experience as a member of the "Suslov commission" on Poland in 1980-81 made him very sympathetic to anti-interventionist voices around him.31 Georgy Shakhnazarov, one of the anti-interventionists and, by fortunate coincidence, the chief supervisor of policy toward Eastern Europe in Gorbachev's entourage and the CC CPSU,52 wrote to the General Secretary in October 1988: "We should clearly see that in the future any possibility to 'put out' crisis situations by military means must be fully excluded. Even the old leadership seems to have already realized it, at least with regard to Poland."53

54

The first few months of 1989 were the last time the Soviet leadership could still focus, at least occasionally, on East-Central Europe. Increasingly, an avalanche of domestic developments, most of them triggered by Gorbachev's reformism but still very much unintended, began to engulf the Soviet leadership. Although Shakhnazarov's portfolio over East-Central European policy prompted him to send several concerned memos to Gorbachev, the lion's share of his time was devoted to writing memos and reports on domestic problems, drafting new legislation, and, after the March 1989 semi-free parliamentary elections, drafting Gorbachev's speeches to the Congress of People's Deputies that opened on 25 May 4 Beginning in late 1988, moreover, the explosion of liberation movements in the Baltic states and the volatile situation in the Caucasus grabbed the Kremlin's attention. The use of the army against nationalist Georgian demonstrators in Tbilisi (the "Tbilisi massacre") on 8-9 April 1989 produced the first political eruption of this volcanic year and inflicted for the first time an irreparable blow to Gorbachev's reputation in the country. Instead of becoming the most urgent concern of the leadership, the Eastern European crisis was overshadowed by the arc of instability inside the Soviet Union itself, and by the major political show in Moscow. "The attention of all of the leadership switched to internal problems," summarized Shakhnazarov, "and so Eastern Europe was [put] on the back burner."55

By that time, conservative critics inside the USSR were already openly arguing that Gorbachev's perestroika had no path or rudder. On 2 May 1989, Chernyaev confessed to his diary that he, too, could not see where events would take them: "Most likely we will come to a collapse of the state and some kind of chaos." Gorbachev "feels that he is losing the levers of power irreversibly." Behind his declarations was "emptiness." 56 Increasingly focused on the growing economic and financial chaos at home, Gorbachev and his reform-minded supporters were not in the least inclined to bail out bankrupt communist regimes. Chernyaev recalls that around that time Gorbachev said to the Politburo that he had information from various sources that Poland was "crawling away from us. ... And what can we do? Poland has a $56 billion debt. Can we take Poland

on our balance sheet in our current economic situation? No. And if we cannot-then we have no influence."57 There were no dissenting voices, although many of the people who then worked with Gorbachev later came to criticize his "passivity" on Eastern Europe. The Politburo leaders also had to agree that economic and financial alternatives for consolidating the European empire had shrunk to a minimum; "socialist integration" had failed and the Soviet Union was nothing more than "a provider of cheap resources." Even the jewels of Stalin's empire, Poland and East Germany, began to look to Gorbachev and the reformers like liabilities.58

One interesting argument has been advanced by Gorbachev's supporters since 1990: that by 1989 they were ready to withdraw all Soviet military forces from Central Europe, but they wanted to do it very gradually, largely because of domestic constraints, not geopolitical realities. In Chernyaev's recent restatement of this thesis (often repeated by Shevardnadze in the past), the fear of the reformers was as follows: "Once we start to withdraw troops, the howling begins: 'What did we fight for, what did 27 million of our soldiers die for in World War II? Are we renouncing all that?' For Gorbachev at that time those. issues were very sensitive."59

60

In retrospect, Gorbachev and his advisers emphatically claimed that "realist" practices and bargaining would never have ended the Soviet-American confrontation." This counterfactual can never be proven by history. What can be established, however, is that the way the Cold War ended did contribute to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The logic of linkage between the two goals, the end of the Cold War and the successful transformation of the Soviet Union, led Gorbachev to renounce the use of force in the domestic context as well, at a point when nationalist forces began to break the country apart. There could be, in effect, two kinds of linkages between the preservation of the Soviet Union and that of the Eastern European empire. One, traditional in Russian history, was: preservation of the empire requires consolidation of its "outer" rim. Another, based on "new political thinking" was: in order to preserve and transform the Soviet Union, one has to bid farewell to the empire and the use of force. In May 1989, Gorbachev told the Politburo: "We have accepted that even in foreign policy force does not help [nichego ne daiet]. So especially internally "we cannot resort and will not resort to force." Even those closest to Gorbachev abhorred the possible collapse of the state that was implicit in such a choice.62 But the Soviet leader remained an incorrigible optimist as much as Stalin had been a dark pessimist.

Gorbachev's decision greatly accelerated the collapse of communist regimes in East-Central Europe. The "Brezhnev doctrine" and Soviet military doctrine, with their emphasis on Central Europe's geostrategic importance, was already dead, but the Warsaw Pact still functioned and East-Central European communist leaders could still rule for years, exploiting the capital of fear of Soviet

intervention to restrain the restive opposition. Nobody in Moscow intended to unleash revolutions in East-Central Europe, nor had anybody decided which course to pursue if they were to erupt.63 Meanwhile, swift dismantling of the Cold War mentality in Europe, developments in the Soviet Union, and vigorous public assurances by Gorbachev about the "universal values" of freedom of choice and the non-use of force, pulled the rug from under the EastCentral European dictators.

The giant Soviet military, intelligence and diplomatic machinery reacted to the breakdown of the European status quo like a beheaded hydra. By 1989, most of the established patterns and ways of working out foreign policy had been broken and abandoned. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze achieved something similar to what Nixon and Kissinger had attempted in 1969-1972: they had created a virtually unlimited space for foreign policy innovations by means of keeping the rest of the party leadership, the military and other hierarchies out of the loop. The real engine of this system was Gorbachev's personal diplomacy. In a parallel to the Nixon of the Watergate period, Gorbachev became increasingly engrossed in the mounting domestic crisis and delegated much of day-to-day foreign policy activities to Shevardnadze and Yakovlev. In the end, Eastern Europe, which had been the focus of the Soviet leadership and bureaucracies from Stalin's and Khrushchev's times, was largely neglected by Gorbachev's foreign policy.64

Gorbachev's personality had much to do with the peaceful death of communism in Eastern Europe (with the exception of Romania). Lévesque writes about Gorbachev's inconsistency in his actions and his "reformist illusions." The Soviet leader continued to believe that the "socialist basis" could be "preserved" in Eastern Europe, and these illusions helped him to ignore a torrent of alarmist and worst-scenario voices and merely to watch with sympathy the spectacular process of dissolution of the communist regimes, first in Poland and Hungary, then in the GDR and the rest of East-Central Europe. 65 But there were other traits of Gorbachev's character at work as well: his belief in his "lodestar" and the magic of persuasion as a substitute for actions. Those who know Gorbachev also point out that he had a deep personal, almost physical aversion to spilling blood.66 Gorbachev's friends stress his moral principles and different generational experience that contrasted with his predecessors' fears of "losing Central Europe." His political enemies believe that Gorbachev “surrendered" Eastern Europe to the West in exchange for his international stardom and the mantle of the "new thinker." They think that Gorbachev's romance with the West distorted his priorities and made him willing to tolerate the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.67

It is simply stunning to observe how easily the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, and how complacently the central Soviet leadership reacted, in contrast to the alarmist and warning signals from Soviet representatives in Central

European countries. Strikingly, Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and Shakhnazarov did not even arrange for a "fire brigade" or emergency meetings to discuss developments in Hungary and Poland in the spring. On 3 March 1989, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Hungary, Miklos Nemeth, informed Gorbachev about the decision "to completely remove the electronic and technological protection from the western and southern borders of Hungary. It has outlived its need, and now it serves only to catch citizens of Romania and the GDR who try to escape illegally to the West through Hungary."68 He added cautiously: "Of course, we will have to talk to comrades from the GDR."69 The only words Gorbachev could utter at this historic juncture were: "We have a strict regime on our borders, but we are also becoming more open.' "70 When the Hungarian leadership sent a note to Shevardnadze about their agreement with West Germany (they received DM 1 billion in loans in exchange for opening the border for East Germans who fled to the West via Hungarian territory), Shevardnadze only answered: "This is an affair that concerns Hungary, the GDR, and the FRG."

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The cable traffic and other communications between Moscow and Warsaw at the critical moment when the Poles voted for Solidarity on 4 June 1989, and during the following two months when the issue of Jaruzelski's presidency was at stake, is not yet available. Mieczysław Rakowski, a leading reformer in the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP), recalls that Gorbachev only called him to find out "what is going on." But he meticulously refrained from any specific advice or anything that could be interpreted as interference in Polish developments." At the same time, Shevardnadze and Soviet ambassadors in the East-Central European countries (particularly in the GDR) acted to prevent involvement of the Soviet military forces and encouraged the non-violent resolution of crises. Shevardnadze, presumably on Gorbachev's instructions, worked closely with his counterparts, US Secretary of State James Baker and West German Foreign Minister HansDietrich Genscher, during the UN General Assembly meeting in September 1989 in New York to resolve the growing crisis over East German refugees in Prague and Budapest.73

Moscow hoped to prevent open Western interference

in the crises in Eastern Europe. Soviet officials were genuinely concerned about the new position of the Bush Administration, realizing that there was no consensus in Washington on Reagan's "romance" with Gorbachev. The Bush Administration included many veterans of the Ford Administration who had been severely criticized from the Right for continuing détente with the Soviet Union; they feared lest that the Gorbachev-Reagan détente would become, again, a political trap for them. Robert Gates, Richard Cheney, and Brent Scowcroft, among others, dismissed "new thinking" as atmospherics at best and a deception campaign at worst, especially since Gorbachev posed as a neo-Leninist who gave no inkling of abandoning the goals of communism. Even the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, completed by February 1989, did not convince them. Scowcroft interpreted it as merely "cutting losses" and a retrenchment of Soviet power. "What was not evident was whether their [the Soviets] appetite also had been dampened. Instead of changing, Soviet priorities seemed only to narrow." As a result, almost a year was lost for the development of a US-Soviet partnership the goal in which Gorbachev had invested so much.75 Only after his first six months in power did Bush decide to move "beyond containment," toward engaging the Soviet Union in the process of peaceful unification of Europe.76

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Bush's trip to East-Central Europe in July and his personal communications to Gorbachev soon assuaged Soviet fears." Starting in September 1989, Shevardnadze struck up an extraordinary friendship with Baker. And at the Malta summit in December, after the collapse of all the East European communist regimes save Romania's, Bush and Gorbachev consolidated their mutual trust and respect.78 The US and West German leadership chose to cooperate fully with Moscow, provided Gorbachev's hands-off course would continue. It did. On 5 October 1989, Chernyaev wrote in his diary: "Gorbachev is flying to the GDR to celebrate its 40th anniversary. He is very reluctant. Called me two times. Today called and said: I will not say a word in support of Honecker. But I will support the Republic and the revolution."79 By that time Chernyaev and other denizens of the Kremlin and the Old Square's party headquarters could watch CNN and other Western TV channels. Chernyaev recorded the combined