Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. We have to include our tank divisions [in the reduction]. There are motorized regiments in tank divisions. We intend to preserve these motorized regiments. And to remove tank regiments from the tank divisions that stay in Germany, so that more tanks could be withdrawn. In this situation should we really reveal the entire structure only because we want more glasnost? I believe that this is the prerogative of those countries that provide their territory for our troops. In any case, we will reveal what can be revealed, but it is not necessary to go all the way. As to the schedule for withdrawal, we are ready to make a report about it. We propose to withdraw three divisions from Eastern Europe during this year and three divisions next year. As to the part concerning the USSR and Mongolia, we are also prepared to report to the Defense Council on the schedule. Ligachev. I would like to mention two or three circumstances...In a word, perestroika in international relations is very substantial. By the way it does not lose its class character, which was stressed by Mikhail Sergeevich [Gorbachev] in his report at the 19th Party Conference. At the same time we spoke, and justifiably so, about the priority of common human values, common human interests. I believe that if it were not for common interests of the countries that belong to different social-economic systems, there would be no unity in actions. A common interest exists apparently in the following directions. The huge burden of military budgets. It is felt by the world of socialism as well as by the world of capitalism. Issues related to the survival of humanity, ecological problems have become burning issues. All this, taken together, and above all our policy of initiatives, have led to some changes for the better.[...] Foreign policy is a very large complex of issues. And most important among them, cardinal, is disarmament.[...] We need disarmament most of all. We carried this burden, with relation to the military budget, with the result that in the economic area we could hardly solve anything important.[...] But this does not mean that we should weaken the defense preparedness of the country. We have enough ways, approaches, and means to reduce the excessively large military expenditures and to use rationally, pragmatically the means for strengthening the defense readiness of the country. We should tell this to the party, [and] to the party activists. Today, when the world has already begun to disarm, slowly but surely, in the final analysis, the power of the state will be determined not by military might, but by a strong economy and by political cohesion of society. Vorotnikov. [...] I would mention only one point. You, Mikhail Sergeevich [Gorbachev] in your speech have emphasized the ambiguous approach to perestroika and the reaction by the capitalist circles, including the United States. But even in the socialist countries we run into serious problems. Maybe in our draft resolution we should formulate directions of our policy towards the socialist commonwealth after all? Indeed, there is nothing in the draft, beside [the point about] telebridges that should be arranged together with socialist journalists. I consider the situation in a number of socialist countries so complicated [neprostaia] that we should in one or another document clarify our thinking. It flows from your speech. Gorbachev. Comrades, let us call it a day. Our action that we have been preparing for so long and implemented has evoked a large amount of publicity. It elevates us to a new level in our thinking and work.[...] In general, I think that our resolution encompasses all these directions [political, diplomatic, ideological follow-up]. But the comrades should read it once again. Perhaps they will add something useful to it or suggest some corrections. [...] I also have points to add. Vitaly Ivanovich [Vorotnikov] said that people ask within the country: how did it come about that we "strip down" independently? And Yegor Kuzmich [Ligachev] approached this theme from another angle: the Party should know. We will still keep it a secret, speaking frankly. And we will keep this secrecy for one reason: if we admit now that we cannot build a longer-term economic and social policy without [unilateral cuts], then we will be forced to explain - why. Today we cannot tell even the Party about it; first of all we should bring about some order. If we say today how much we are removing for defense from the national revenue, this may reduce to naught [the effect] of the speech at the United Nations. Since such a [disatrous] situation does not exist in any other country. Perhaps only in poor [nischenskikh] countries, where half of their budget goes to military spending. Shevardnadze. For instance, in Angola. Gorbachev. Yes. But there the budget and everything is different. We are talking about another story. If we take this [glasnost approach] now, then [people] will tell us: your proposal is rubbish, you should cut your military expenditures by three-fourths. How do we go about it, comrades? First, in our plans we build in military expenses twice as large as the growth of national income, then our national income turns out to be going down the tubes, but we stick to our military plans. So you should [be able to] figure out [prikinte] what is going on here. For that reason we should be patient for a little bit longer. But you are all right-we will have to speak about it. Meanwhile only in a political sense.[...] By the time of 13th Five-Year Plan, Yuri Dmitrievich [Masliukov] we will implement all these decisions and will have something to say. Then our expenditures on this article [defense] will be somewhat Two great revolutions, the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution of 1917, have exerted a powerful influence on the actual nature of the historical process and radically changed the course of world events. Both of them, each in its own way, have given a gigantic impetus to man's progress. They are also the ones that have formed in many respects the way of thinking which is still prevailing in the public consciousness. That is a very great spiritual wealth, but there emerges before us today a different world, for which it is necessary to seek different roads toward the future, to seek-relying, of course, on accumulated experience-but also seeing the radical differences between that which was yesterday and that which is taking place today. The newness of the tasks, and at the same time their difficulty, are not limited to this. Today we have entered an era when progress will be based on the interests of all mankind. Consciousness of this requires that world policy, too, should be determined by the priority of the values of all mankind. The history of the past centuries and millennia has been a history of almost ubiquitous wars, and sometimes desperate battles, leading to mutual destruction. They occurred in the clash of social and political interests and national hostility, be it from ideological or religious incompatibility. All that was the case, and even now many still claim that this past-which has not been overcome-is an immutable pattern. However, parallel with the process of wars, hostility, and alienation of peoples and countries, another process, just as objectively conditioned, was in motion and gaining force: The process of the emergence of a mutually connected and integral world. [...] The very tackling of global problems requires a new "volume" and "quality" of cooperation by states and sociopolitical currents regardless of ideological and other differences. Of course, radical and revolutionary changes are taking place and will continue to take place within individual countries and social structures. This has been and will continue to be the case, but our times are making corrections here, too. Internal transformational processes cannot achieve their national objectives merely by taking "course parallel" with others without using the achievements of the surrounding world and the possibilities of equitable cooperation. In these conditions, interference in those internal processes with the aim of altering them according to someone else's prescription would be all the more destructive for the emergence of a peaceful order. In the past, differences often served as a factor in puling away from one another. Now they are being given the opportunity to be a factor in mutual enrichment and attraction. Behind differences in social structure, in the way of life, and in the preference for certain values, stand interests. There is no getting away from that, but neither is there any getting away from the need to find a balance of interests within an international framework, which has become a condition for survival and progress. As you ponder all this, you come to the conclusion that if we wish to take account of the lessons of the past and the realities of the present, if we must reckon with the objective logic of world development, it is necessary to seek-and the seek jointly-an approach toward improving the international situation and building a new world. If that is so, then it is also worth agreeing on the fundamental and truly universal prerequisites and principles for such activities. It is evident, for example, that force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be instruments of foreign policy. [...] Freedom of choice is a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions. We have not come to the conclusion of (continued on page 198) The Tbilisi Massacre, April 1989: Documents [On 9 April 1989, Soviet Army troops and Interior Ministry forces opened fire on a mass demonstration in front of Government House in Tbilisi, Georgia. The demonstration had begun as a hunger strike by several hundred students to denounce attempts by the Abkhasian minority to secede from Georgia one of a growing number of ethnic, nationalist, even separatist disturbances that perestroika had unleashed within the Soviet Union. The protest quickly escalated into an anti-government demonstration with calls for a restoration of Georgia's independence. Cutting off escape routes and using toxic gas and metal entrenching tools, the government forces under the command of Gen. Igor Rodionov quickly put a violent end to the peaceful demonstration, killing at least nineteen people. Several hundred demonstrators, many of them women and youth, suffered injuries as a result of crowd rush, stabbing and poisonings. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been abroad during the crisis, quickly criticized the use of force by the Soviet Army and the Georgian Communist leadership. But to opposition groups within the USSR and East-Central Europe, the Tbilisi massacre became a chilling reminder of the fragility of perestroika and the potential for violent reactions by the authorities. The documents printed below (in excerpts) were published by S. V. Popov, Yu. V. Vasil'yev and A.D. Chernev in the journal Istoricheskiy Arkhiv. The three cables from Georgian leader Dzhumbar Patiashvili to Moscow had been published earlier in the stenographic record of the first USSR Congress of People's Deputies by A. I. Luk 'yanov, but, according to Popov et al., contained a mass of inaccuracies if compared to the archival copies in the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD). Additional materials on the Tbilisi massacre are likely to be found the records of the Presidential Archive, the Ministry of Interior Archives as well as the General Staff Archives, thus far largely inaccessible to researchers.-Christian F. Ostermann] DOCUMENT No. 2 Telegram from D. I. Patiashvili to the CC CPSU, 8 April 1989 Incoming enciphered message No. 219/sh From Tbilisi 8:50 p.m. I report that the situation in Tbilisi continues to remain tense. A gathering of many thousands of people is taking place at Government House whose main slogans remain as before: "Secession from the USSR, the creation of an independent Georgia”, “Liquidation of autonomies", etc. A 3,500-person rally in the Abkhazian ASSR [Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic] of people of Georgian nationality directed against the secession of Abkhaziya from the GSSR has taken place. In a number of higher educational institutions parts of the student body have declared a hunger strike in support of the demonstrators. As a whole the CP [Communist Party] CC, the government, and local Party and government authorities have a grip on the situation and are taking the necessary measures to stabilize the situation. Yesterday, 7 April, a meeting of the Bureau of the CC Georgian CP [GCP] took place and today there was a meeting of the Party activists of the Republic at which measures of Party, government, and law enforcement agencies were approved to strengthen political, organizational, and indoctrination work in labor collectives and places of residence; also, an appeal of the CC of the Communist Party, the Supreme Soviet, and the Council of Ministers of Georgia to the Party members and workers of Georgia has been adopted. In particular, it was planned to hold meetings of activists in all regions of the Republic and meetings of primary Party organizations with the participation of members of the Bureau and the CC GCP where practical plans of action were worked out for the development of projected measures. A series of speeches of eminent figures of science and culture of the Republic and representatives of the working class and peasantry have been organized on television and radio and in the press. "Roundtables" and youth meetings are being held in higher educational institutions on current issues of the public life of Georgia, the destructiveness of illegal activities, the measures of responsibility for what has been done, and the need to strengthen discipline and order for the further development of democracy and glasnost. After the activists' meeting everyone fanned out and went to workplaces to explain its materials and the Party policy in present conditions and the unity of the Party and the people in carrying out the tasks of perestroika. Workers' groups [druzhiny] consisting of 4,685 people have been created at 111 Tbilisi enterprises and institutions to maintain discipline and orderliness. Specific plans have been developed and are being carried out together with the MVD and ZAKVO [sic] to maintain law and order and adopt, if necessary, exhaustive measures to prevent disorders and illegal acts. The entire staff of the CC, the Supreme Soviet, the GSSR Council of Ministers, the Tbilisi City Party Committee and City Executive Committee are efficiently performing their functions and actively working among the population and demonstrators. No more additional measures on the part of the CC CPSU or the USSR government are required at the present time besides those adopted earlier. This is reported for your information. Secretary of the CC GCP, D. Patiashvili [Source: TsKhSD, f. 89. Collection of documents, Xerox copy, published in Istoricheskiy Arkhiv 3 (1993), pp. 9596. Translated for CWIHP by Gary Goldberg.] DOCUMENT No. 3 Telegram from D. I. Patiashvili to the CC CPSU, 9 April 1989 Incoming enciphered message No. 220/sh From Tbilisi 10:25 a.m. In Tbilisi after 9:00 p.m. on the night of 8 April 1989, in spite of all measures being taken by the Party, government, and the forces of law and order, the situation at a demonstration of about 15,000 people at the Republic Government House and also in other parts of the city began to be inflamed by extremists and got out of control. Besides antiSoviet, anti-socialist, and anti-Russian exhortations, appeals began to be spread by extremists for physical violence against Communists, leaders of the Republic, and members of their families. The demonstrators, among whom |