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June 20, 1988

Anatoly Chernyaev, Notes from a Meeting of the Politburo

Anatoly Chernyaev’s notes from the Politburo session on June 20, 1988, during which military spending, party membership, the progress of perestroika, and CPSU organizational leadership were discussed.

October 29, 1990

Record of a Conversation Between M. S. Gorbachev and President of France, F. Mitterrand

Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Francois Mitterrand, on the subject of Saddam Hussein and his invasion of Kuwait. Both leaders stress the importance of avoiding military conflict and the necessity of a united front for the permanent members of the UN Security Council in order to achieve this. Mitterrand notes his apprehension over the US perception of UN Charter Article 51 and the possibility US initiation of hostilities.

February 9, 1990

Soviet Record of Conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and US Secretary of State J. Baker

Gorbachev and Baker discuss cuts in strategic arms and conventional forces, focusing on air-based and sea-based cruise missiles.

July 25, 1989

Report of the President of Hungary Rezso Nyers and General Secretary Karoly Grosz on Talks with Gorbachev in Moscow (excerpts)

President of People’s Republic of Hungary, Rezso Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Karoly Grosz, report on their talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, 24-25 July, 1989. The excerpts contains economic reformer Nyers’ assessment of the political situation in Hungary, and first among the factors that "can defeat the party," he lists "the past, if we let ourselves [be] smeared with it." The memory of the revolution of 1956 and its bloody repression by the Soviets was Banquo’s ghost, destroying the legitimacy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, just as 1968 in Prague and 1981’s martial law in Poland and all the other Communist "blank spots" of history came back in 1989 to crumble Communist ideology. For their part, the Communist reformers (including Gorbachev) did not quite know how to respond as events accelerated in 1989, except not to repeat 1956.

March 24, 1989

Conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and Karoly Grosz, General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, March 23-24, 1989

These conversations reveal Gorbachev’s contradictions, as the Soviet leader proclaims again that the Brezhnev doctrine is dead and military interventions should be "precluded in the future, yet at the same time, tries to set "boundaries" for the changes in Eastern Europe as "the safekeeping of socialism and assurance of stability."