Skip to content

Results:

1 - 4 of 4

Documents

March 10, 1988

Anatoly Chernyaev, Notes from a Meeting of the Politburo

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

June 14, 1989

Conversation between M. S. Gorbachev and FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl

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

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.

October 23, 1989

Memorandum of Telephone Conversation: Telephone Call from Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Federal Republic of Germany, October 23, 1989, 9:02-9:26 a.m. EDT

Telephone conversation between President George H. W. Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on the situation in Eastern Europe.