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Documents

February 22, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with President Gorbachev, 21 February 1991

Kohl and Gorbachev discuss the domestic situation in the Soviet Union as well as the struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

March 3, 1989

Record of Conversation Between M.S. Gorbachev and Member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Part, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Hungary M. Nemeth

Conversation between Gorbachev and Miklos Nemeth about protecting Hungarian borders, Hungary's decision to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, and the Soviet Union's potential normalization of relations with Israel.

October 31, 1988

Memorandum, 'Re: Chinese Views on Some Aspects of Hungarian and Soviet Reform Policies'

The Hungarian Ministry of the Interior weighs how China views the ongoing reforms in Hungary.

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.