A report by Etre Sandor providing details about five North Korean governmental delegations to Africa and Middle East and the visit of Pak Seong-cheol to Hungary.

Hungarian Ambassador to Cuba János Beck reports on Cuban-Soviet divergence after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba’s divergence includes other socialist countries, while preserving a special relationship with Czechoslovakia. Beck offers criticism of Cuba’s leadership, politics, and independent stance, but along with the Soviet Union reinforces that Cuba is true to the revolution.

Hungarian ambassador to Czechoslovakia Lajos Cséby summarizes Deputy Head of the Sixth Main Department [of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs] Stross’s report on relations between Cuba and Czechoslovakia. Stross reports friendly relations between the two countries, which did not experience difficulties during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stross outlines Cuba’s problems, economically and politically, and believes that Cuba’s revolutionary success depends on its economic growth. Cuba misunderstood the Soviet Union’s approach to the Cuban Missile Crisis. This led to signs of Chinese influence on Cuban politics, which Stross believes are reversing since Castro’s [1963] visit to the Soviet Union.

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."

This document explains the views of the cooperating Socialist countries relating to Afghanistan. The USSR perceived the US attempt to line up NATO support against the Soviets as an aggressive action, designed to counter Soviet influence. The Soviets, by contrast, viewed their involvement in Afghanistan as increasing their sphere of influence around the Warsaw-pact countries, making such actions defense, rather than offensive. The USSR's leadership states that it should increase its ties to NATO countries to counteract the foreign policy of the US.