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

Soviet Ambassador Yudin discusses the 20th Congress of the CPSU with Mao, including Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin and his cult of personality. Mao had already seen a copy and discusses mistakes in Stalin's policy towards China at length.

In this extraordinary conversation, Solidarity’s leader fears the collapse of the Wall would distract West Germany’s attention - and money - to the GDR, at the time when Poland, the trail-blazer to the post-communist era in Eastern Europe, desperately needed both. "Events are moving too fast," Walesa said, and only hours later, the Wall fell, and Kohl had to cut his Poland visit short to scramble back to Berlin, thus proving Walesa’s fear correct.

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.

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."

A visit of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin from 26-30 June 1967 prompts this report from the Mexican Embassy in Havanna to the Secretary of Foreign Relations in Mexico City. They discuss: the position assumed by the Cuban Government and Communist Party in relation to Latin America, the Middle East and Vietnam, the internal administration of Cuba and the political operation in Cuba.

Soviet Ambassador Puzanov introduces Hafizullah Amin at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs to a delegation from the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by the President of the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik SSR, M.S. Asimov. They discuss the state of scientific research in Afghanistan and future scientific cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Ae delegation from the USSR Academy of Sciences meets with Taraki to discuss scientific development in Afghanistan and future collaboration with the Soviet Union.

The report of a conversation in Moscow between Cuban Communist Official Carlos Rafael Rodriguez and Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev, discussing Soviet-Cuban relations and public announcements of support.

A report from the Cuban Mission to the UN concerning a conversation with Anastas Mikoyan and US President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The three are mostly focused on discussing US-Latin American diplomatic relations, and concerns over American military presence in Latin America, specifically the US fly-overs. Kennedy continues to reiterate the US's position on 'no US invasion of Cuba.'