Politburo meeting centered on Comecon and the importance of maintaining fruitful trade relationships with other socialist nations.

In a conversation recorded by Chernyaev, Gorbachev candidly discusses the political situation in East and West Germany, the weakness of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), and the Soviet strategy for managing German reunification.

Gorbachev and Thatcher discuss reforms in the Soviet Union and issues with inter-ethnic tensions. Thatcher states that she is not in support of German unification.

Excerpts from a dinner conversation between Gorbachev and Mitterrand where they discuss the political situations in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, and also comment on the US political system.

Gorbachev and Kohl discuss relations with the United States, Kohl's upcoming visit to Poland, and the status of reforms in various socialist countries.

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.

Report on First Secretary of the Polish People's Republic Wojciech Jaruzelski's 1989 visit to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev and discuss the transformations occurring in the Soviet Union.