The End of the Warsaw Pact, 1985-1991: Viewed from the Bulgarian Archives, by Jordan Baev
In the mid-1990s, as other Eastern European archives, the main political archives in Bulgaria from the period 1944-1975 were made public. In 1999 the most strictly guarded Bulgarian Communist Party Politburo special collection of "Directives B” from 1946-1989, containing more than 900 files, was declassified too. They refer mainly to the activities of the Armed and Security Forces, deliveries of armaments and financial aid to Third World countries and leftist guerrilla movements, and diverse issues of Bulgarian internal and foreign policy. Until recently, nearly all materials of this collection were classified as ”Top Secret of High Priority". In addition, more than 16,000 other files with CC BCP Politburo and Secretariat decisions, reports, and information materials are now available at the Central State Archive in Sofia.[1]
The first question likely to be asked by the Western reader is to what extent the archives of a small Balkan country could give a clear and accurate picture of the important events and processes within the Soviet bloc as a whole. Indeed, in the global confrontation of the Cold War period, the Balkans played a secondary role in comparison with the concentration of forces and permanent confrontation in Central Europe. Yet the Balkan documents are important for other reasons. Owing to specific historical and psychological as well as political and economic circumstances of the post-World War II period, the Bulgarian leadership was the Kremlin’s most loyal ally. The newly declassified documents show the particularly close relations between the long-lasting Bulgarian ruler Todor Zhivkov and his Soviet counterparts, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Even the obvious mutual coolness of Zhivkov’s relations with Mikhail Gorbachev after 1986 was compensated for by the close contacts maintained between the State and Party administrations of both countries at all levels. This is particularly important for the contacts between top military, security and diplomatic officers, who even after the dramatic changes that had taken place in Eastern Europe in 1989 kept the habit and practice of coordinating their attitudes and actions. The “special relationship” between Moscow and Sofia was preserved also at the time of the socialist government of Andrei Lukanov in early 1990 and even after Zheliu Zhelev, the leader of the anticommunist opposition, was elected President of Bulgaria in July 1990.
Secondly, the documents related to the Warsaw Pact give an authentic account of the different Eastern European countries’ positions in Soviet bloc structures. They complement, for example, the available collection of the Russian State Archives of Contemporary History (RGANI), the records of the Gorbachev Foundation, and the documents in the Papers of Gen. D. Volkogonov at the Library of Congress in Washington.[2] Additional details uncover the meetings between the Eastern European leaders, the diplomatic correspondence of Bulgarian Foreign Ministry with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the GDR as well as analytical reports made under the Ministry of Defense in Sofia. Another valuable archival source is the special intelligence and counterintelligence information exchange between the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior and the relevant Eastern European security services, such as the KGB, STASI, and others. For instance, for the period 1985-1988 the correspondence with KGB officials in Moscow alone exceeds 5000 pages in size. A Bulgarian Counterintelligence Report, dated 23 February 1988, states that during 1987 there were 245 information and analysis items received from the KGB and more than 300 Information items and requests for information sent to Moscow. Soviet and Bulgarian secret services collaborated in the same year on 23 “operative cases”.[3] The Bulgarian archives provide vivid evidence of the importance of sources from a small European state in global setting.
The collection published on this website focuses on two main themes: the belated attempt to reform the Warsaw Pact’s structures to give them new meaning and function, and the persisting hidden contradictions among its member states. These main themes are inevitably permeated by such additional important themes as the attitudes toward Gorbachev's perestroika, the mutual influence and interaction between foreign and domestic policies, the positions of the Pact as such and its particular Eastern European member states regarding disarmament and armed forces reduction in Central Europe. In view of the character of the documents, they illuminate best the positions of Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, but they also give important insights into specific positions of the remaining Eastern European countries, particularly into the policy and intentions of the Ceauşescu regime of Romania.
The documented period may be divided into three parts: 1985-1986, 1987-1989, 1990-1991. During the first part of the period, the relations among the allies preserved the main characteristic of the previous period, namely, the permanent opposition of Romania to the Soviet appeals for "firmness with change," Andropov-style. On the way toward the 1989 upheaval during the second part of the period, the internal differences and confrontations deepened and multiplied. Similarities in reaction toward Gorbachev’s perestroika grouped some countries closer together, and the public effect of their reactions increased not only in Eastern Europe but also in the West. The last part of the period was marked by the inevitable dissolution of the Eastern European military and political alliance in spite of feeble, inconsistent, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts of the Kremlin to control events. Although the unification of Germany was a significant factor in their development it has not been given special attention in the selection of documents because they show nothing important that could not already be learned from elsewhere.
Firmness with Change (1985-1986)
The first meeting of the Political Consultative Committee (PCC) of the Warsaw Treaty Organization after Mikhail Gorbachev's coming into power took place on the 22-23 October 1985 in Sofia. This regular session had originally been planned to be held on the 15-16 January of that year[4] but was postponed because of the illness and death of Gorbachev's predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko. Immediately after being elected General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev had already had the possibility to talk with his East European colleagues in Moscow as well as later in Warsaw but it had usually been the highest political body of the Warsaw Pact that provided the representative rostrum for new initiatives.
Nevertheless, nothing significantly new happened at the Sofia PCC meeting. In the speeches of Gorbachev and other Eastern European leaders reverberated the spirit of the past - in their appeals for an "offensive" against the "aggressive imperialistic circles", for steps to neutralize the US "Strategic Defense Initiative," and for not permitting the "disruption of the military parity" between the two blocs (see Gorbachev's speech of 22 October 1985). The agenda of the session was traditional: a discussion of the "topical tasks" and the hearing of the report on the Pact by the Supreme Commander of its Unified Armed Forces, Marshal Viktor Kulikov. In the process of the discussions a new accent was added, namely, on the improvement of the mechanism of the organization's functioning. Based on the previous statement adopted at the conference of the alliance’s Committee of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs (CMFA) in Sofia in October 1983, which was subsequently developed into a detailed proposal by Gorbachev himself, the PCC adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a Multilateral Group for Current Mutual Information. A proposal for holding annual PCC sessions was also approved. In reply to the insistence of the Romanian delegation (Ceauşescu proposed a unilateral decrease of the military budgets by 15-20 percent), a compromise resolution providing for the formation of a group of experts to study the reduction of the armed forces and defense expenditures was adopted.[5]
At the Budapest PCC meeting in 1986 Eastern European leaders once again displayed "full unanimity" and support of Soviet policy.[6] Nevertheless Nicolae Ceauşescu came up with a proposal for the reduction of the armed forces, armaments, and military expenses by 30 percent by 1990 and by 50 percent by the year 2000 as well as the dissolution of the two blocs by the end of the century. Later Todor Zhivkov would with irony and irritation mention to his colleagues in the BCP Politburo the repeated attempt of the “great peacemaker" Nicolae Ceauşescu to stun the world.[7]
Belated Attempts at a Warsaw Pact Perestroika (1987-1989)
During 1987 the bilateral and multilateral contacts of the Eastern European leaders significantly intensified. In the course of this year, Todor Zhivkov had five meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. Vadim Medvedev and Nikolai Slyunkov, Secretaries of the CPSU CC, visited Sofia with special missions, and the Bulgarian Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov and Foreign Minister Petar Mladenov were received in Moscow by Gorbachev. The stenographic memos of the bilateral talks between Zhivkov and Gorbachev held in May and October 1987 are especially interesting (see memorandum of 11 May 1987 and memorandum of 16 October 1987).
Despite the widely advertised Bulgarian-Soviet friendship and full unanimity, 1987 was the year when mutual distrust began to creep into the personal relations between the two countries’ leaders. This was a feeling which Zhivkov had never let out in his contacts with Khrushchev and Brezhnev. At the same time, Gorbachev’s contacts with the “conservative” leaders of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, Erich Honecker and Gustáv Husák, became more and more tense while his relations with Ceauşescu were strictly formal. Nevertheless, these internal contradictions never came to surface until 1989.
In 1987 a growing confrontation between two Warsaw Pact member countries (Hungary and Romania) began to appear clearly, this time over ethnic issues. At the 14th session of the CMFA, held in Moscow on 24-25 March, Hungary tried to put forward the issue of its ethnic minority in Transylvania. The consideration of the Romanian-Hungarian differences was waived aside by other participating parties. It was the first time in the history of the Warsaw Pact that a bilateral conflict between its member countries came to light at a multilateral forum. During the Vienna meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), Hungary again put forward the issue of its differences with Romania and even indirectly sought support from the West.[8] At the same time, the Bulgarian authorities presented a similar ethnic dispute with a NATO member country, Turkey, as a part of an "imperialistic attack against Socialism”, but the Eastern European allies, except the USSR, refused to support Bulgaria’s claim.
The Multilateral Group for Current Mutual Information had 26 sessions in the period from spring 1987 till September 1990, when a decision to eliminate expert groups of the CMFA was made. During the discussions, selected member countries presented information on a wide range of current issues, the topics and the speakers usually being appointed in advance by the CMFA. Several times the discussions were held in the course of the Vienna talks. Among the issues discussed were the regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Central America, the situation in the Middle East, the Soviet-US summit talks, the renewal of relations with Israel, and the situation on the Balkans. All participants considered the comparison of different sources and data with regard to various topics an extremely useful form of cooperation in the field of foreign policy. Nevertheless, in the second half of 1989 and in the beginning of 1990, these conferences came to be used for justification of the more differing assessments and positions of the individual countries.
Cooperation between secret services was following the same pattern. In 1987 a special conference on terrorism was held in Varna, and next year a conference on Joint Security Information Database was prepared in Bulgaria.[9] In October 1988 in East Berlin was organized a meeting of Eastern European Foreign Intelligence representatives, and in May 1989, another meeting of Military Intelligence representatives was held in Moscow. The exchange of secret information and sharing of operational experience (for instance, in the field of “counter-terrorist operations against the internal nationalistic and religious activity”) continued to be an important factor in bilateral and multilateral collaboration within the Warsaw Pact until 1989. One of the most significant strategic topics of mutual interest, continuously discussed during the 1980s among the secret services, was the so called “VRIAN [Vnezapnoe raketnoe iadernoe napadenie], namely, the “thorough preventive examination of all indications of a possible surprise missile nuclear attack by NATO.”
On the eve of the PCC meeting in Warsaw in July 1988, Nicolae Ceauşescu made his most radical proposal for changes in the Pact’s organizational structure. On 4 July 1988 a request for urgent bilateral consultations regarding the new Romanian initiative “for democratization and improvement of the organization and the functioning of the Warsaw Treaty bodies” was sent to Moscow from Bucharest. During the consultations that subsequently took place in Moscow on 7 July 1988, special Romanian envoy I. Koman gave Soviet Foreign Minister E. Shevardnadze a letter from Ceauşescu to Gorbachev. Letters of identical content were sent the next day to all other Eastern European leaders (see letter from the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party). There were five points in the Romanian proposal, the most important of which was the one suggesting taking the PCC out of the Warsaw Pact structures. Thus the Pact would have been transformed from a military-political organization into a military one. Ceauşescu’s letter also contained a proposal for the introduction of a rotational principle providing for a period of one-year tenure for the highest management positions of the coalition’s political and military structures.
In a confidential message sent by the Soviet leadership to Sofia, all Romanian proposals were rejected, the main argument being that they “aim at weakening the now existing military organization of the alliance”. The Bulgarian Politburo adopted a special resolution stating that for the time being Ceauşescu’s letter was not to be answered and the issue be discussed by conferences of the Committees of the Foreign and Defense Ministers (see confidential information of 8 July 1988). At the Warsaw PCC meeting and the subsequent conference of the CMFA in Budapest in October 1988, other initiatives for the improvement of the organizational structures of the Warsaw Pact were considered, but not the Romanian proposal. In his speech at the PCC meeting on 15 July 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev suggested a “change of the organizational structure of the Warsaw Treaty Organization Armed Forces in the course of 2-3 years” and an unilateral reduction of the Pact's military units in Central Europe. The fundamental principle for building up the defense policy of the alliance was formulated as “minimum required expenses-maximum required results” (see Gorbachev's speech of 15 July 1988). At the subsequent CMFA conference, the proposals for the establishment of a “Permanent Political Operating Body,” the widening of the coordinating functions of the Secretary General of the Organization, and the holding of a joint session of the Committees of Foreign and Defense Ministers were approved. A decision to establish a separate working group “on the improvement of the mechanism of cooperation” was made as well. As Romania kept insisting that its proposals should be considered prior to the next PCC meeting in Bucharest in June 1989, there were replies sent from Moscow and other East European capitals which unambiguously rejected Ceauşescu’s idea.
During the dramatic year of 1989 two contradictory tendencies in the positions of member countries of the Pact were clearly expressed as early as the 18th CMFA conference in Berlin in April. Romania and the GDR openly attacked Moscow and other allies for the “concessions” made to the West and for causing an inner crisis within the “socialist system.”[10] (see memorandum from Mladenov of 24 April 1989). On the other hand, Hungary and Poland demanded a less confrontational and “non-bloc” approach, as well as radical reform in the political system. According to them, this reform should have included the adoption of a pluralistic parliamentary democracy, something unthinkable before. The Czechoslovak leadership, under stress from the "1968 syndrome", undertook strong repressive action within the country.[11] The position of Zhivkov, the "doyen" of the East European communist rulers, reminded to a certain extent of his behavior during the Czech and Polish crises (1968 and 1980-1981 respectively).[12] He publicly praised the perestroika and glasnost policy but confidentially criticized "unacceptable concessions" and "power surrender". In the process of the ever growing differences between the Warsaw Pact member states, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev kept on repeating to the Western and Eastern European leaders that the "Brezhnev Doctrine" was irreversibly rejected in favor of the so-called “Sinatra Doctrine”: “each one to go his own way”.
At the bilateral meeting between Gorbachev and Zhivkov on 23 June 1989, the Soviet leader explicitly repeated this several times (see memorandum of 23 June 1989).[13] The internal political situation in Hungary was the main topic at the talks between Todor Zhivkov and Károly Grósz on April 16-17, 1989, in Sofia. In a strictly confidential message for the BCP Politburo a day after the talks were completed, Todor Zhivkov emphasized: “My impression is that we are going to loose Hungary. This is the real situation and we must be aware of it.” (see memorandum from Zhivkov of 18 April 1989). The information was sent to the Kremlin through Soviet ambassador in Sofia Viktor Sharapov. With reference to the “alarming situation” in Hungary and Poland, Zhivkov underlined the eventual “dangerous” consequences, viz.: “leaving the Warsaw pact and breaking up the COMECON, imposing in the best case the so called Finnish or Austrian models".[14]
The situation in Poland gave ground for even more animated discussions only a month after the PCC meeting in Bucharest in July 1989. On 20 August 1989, Ceauşescu addressed an appeal for an extraordinary meeting of the Warsaw Pact leaders in respect to the "anti-communist events in Poland”. He called the situation in Poland a “threat” to the Warsaw Pact.[15] Gorbachev as well as the remaining Eastern European leaders rejected this proposal for different reasons. Erich Honecker stated that “the GDR party and state leadership follows the course of the events in Poland with great concern” but that the holding of a multilateral meeting might be used “by the opposition circles in our countries for organizing themselves”. In a special phone conversation with Gorbachev on August 22, the Polish Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski firmly assured him that Poland would not leave the Warsaw Treaty Organization.
In 22 August 1989 the Bulgarian leader prepared a special secret memo for the Politburo under the title "Considerations on the situation in Poland". In Zhivkov's memo, the Polish communists were criticized several times for "loosing the power" though the presidential authority, the armed forces and the police had been in their hands. At the end of his memo, Zhivkov summarized: "The Polish phenomenon, if it can be called so, has national as well as international dimensions. Its reverberation is extremely strong in all parts of the globe. The resonance is of particular significance in the world of socialism. Tthe outcome of the situation in Poland obviously should be a matter of concern and responsibility of all brotherly parties."[16]
In the spirit of the PCC decisions from the period from July 1988 to fall 1989, four sessions of a special expert group on ”issues related to the improvement of the mechanism of cooperation within the Warsaw Treaty” took place. Due to the “deep opposition of views” between Romania and the remaining six allies, no consensus was found. At the fifth session in February 1990, unanimity was reached in respect to several main proposals, including those for the widening and transformation of the functions of the Pact’s Secretary General, and for the acceptance of a rotation principle in regard of the post of the Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces. No agreement was reached on the Polish and Hungarian proposals for transferring the Headquarters to Warsaw and for the creation of a mechanism for “contacts and interaction” with NATO. According to the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry’s document on the results of the Budapest session, “the course of the discussion showed a visible shift of interests.”[17].
Inevitable Dissolution (1990-1991)
On the eve of the regular PCC meeting in Moscow in June 1990, the Czechoslovak delegation presented several radical proposals: for the termination of the expert group activities, for the changing of the name of the Committee of the Ministers of Defense to “Military Committee”, and for the reorganization of the Unified Armed Forces Headquarters so that “the obligations toward the alliance are fulfilled exclusively through the defense of one’s own national territory.” (see Czechoslovak Proposals of 4 June 1990). The Bulgarian government continued to coordinate its policy with Moscow until 1991, as in the previous decades. Only at the last stages of the Vienna CSCE meeting, differences between the Soviet and the Bulgarian positions appeared, most of them regarding the number and proportion of the envisaged force reduction.
The PCC meeting in Moscow adopted the important resolution for the establishment of a “Temporary Commission of Governmental Plenipotentiary Representatives on the Reconsideration of All Aspects of the Warsaw Treaty Activities.” The first session of the new commission took place in Czechoslovakia on 15-17 July 1990. The majority of the delegations agreed that the military functions should be terminated and gradually “dissolved” into the prospective all-European security system. The Hungarian party suggested more radical measures, including the termination of the Organization itself in the near future. The delegations of the USSR, Bulgaria and Romania insisted on transforming the Warsaw Pact into a “treaty of sovereign states with equal rights”, and Poland, into a “treaty of a collective system with purely consultative functions.” At the next session of the “Temporary Representatives Commission” in Sofia on 18-19 September, the positions of the three Central European countries were transformed into a more definite form of a request for the overall liquidation of the military structures of the Pact.[18]
At the end of September 1990, the Hungarian government suggested that an extraordinary PCC meeting take place on 4 November for the purpose of transforming the Warsaw Pact into a purely political organization. In October, Gorbachev informed the Hungarian government that “owing to internal engagements” he would not be able to attend a meeting in November. In the Kremlin’s message, the main purpose of an extraordinary meeting was described as the adoption of “measures for basic changes in the structure and the character of the Warsaw Treaty with regard to the development of the integration processes in Europe”.[19] During the talks of Mikhail Gorbachev with the Hungarian Prime Minister József Antall in Paris at the end of November 1990, the PCC meeting was scheduled for the end of February 1991 (see memorandum of conversation of 23 November 1990).
In Budapest on 25 February 1991, a “Protocol for the Termination of the Defense Agreements Concluded within the Warsaw Treaty and Liquidation of Its Military Bodies and Structures” was accepted. According to the resolution, beginning with 31 March the activities of the Committee of the Ministers of Defense were terminated, as were those of the Supreme Command of the Unified Armed Forces, the Warsaw Pact's Military Council, the Headquarters of the Committee on Technology, and the Unified Air Defense System. The military treaties of 14 May 1955, 17 March 1969, and 18 March 1980 were nullified.[20]
On 17 May 1991, Czechoslovak President Václav Havel addressed an official invitation to his Eastern European colleagues to carry out the Czechoslovak proposal of February to hold a concluding PCC meeting on 1 July 1991, in Prague with the purpose of signing a joint Protocol for the termination of the activities of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. At the agreed date, 1 July 1991, after 36 years of existence, the Eastern European military and political alliance was terminated.
JORDAN BAEV is graduate of Sofia University and received his PhD in History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was a Senior Research Fellow on Military, Political, and Security issues at the Rakovski Defense College. Currently he is a Senior Expert at the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense and Associate Professor of National Security and Conflict Management at the University of National and World Economy and New Bulgarian University in Sofia. He is Vice-President of the Bulgarian Association of Military History and Executive Director of the Center for Conflict Studies as well as the coordinator of the Cold War Research Group-Bulgaria, a PHP affiliate.
Notes
[1] Our research on the "Cold War on the Balkans" for the first time acquainted the public with a large number of documents from the Bulgarian diplomatic, security and military files, to which admission is still partially restricted. For the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP), Dr. Stanchev, Dr. Yanakiev, Dr. Petrov and other experts affiliated with the Cold War Research Group explored more than 80 record groups, consisting of about 90,000 files, of the diplomatic documentation and more than 4,000 files of the State Security documentation. After thorough research we finally selected and requested the declassification of approximately 250 files with more than 3,000 pages of formerly top secret materials. Due to the forthcoming attitude of the Ministries of both Foreign Affairs and the Interior, almost all of our requests had been fulfilled by early 2000. We are grateful for the professional aid received from the Director of the Central State Archive in Sofia (Mr. Georgi Chernev) and the Heads of the Departmental Archives (Mrs. Boteva and Mr. Stoykov) and as well as for the expert efforts of archivists at these Departments (Mr. Vlahov, Mrs. Kalcheva), which facilitated the quick implementation of our requests. As a result, it was possible to obtain much new information and throw additional light on the history of the Warsaw Pact from previously unknown documentary evidence.
See Jordan Baev, “България и създаването на Варшавския договор [Bulgaria and the creation of the Warsaw Pact]”, Military History Journal [Sofia] no. 4 (1995): 39-61; “Изграждане на военната структура на Организацията на Варшавския договор 1955- [Building of the Warsaw Pact’ Military Structures, 1955-1969]”, Military History Journal [Sofia] no. 5 (1997): 56-77; “България и краят на Варшавския пакт 1985-1991 [Bulgaria and the end of the Warsaw Pact: 1985-1991]”, Military History Journal [Sofia] no. 6 (1999): 51-64. The most interesting documents from the whole postwar period are included in the now available interactive documentary CD ROM volume, "Bulgaria in the Warsaw Pact" (B-M Publishing House). The second CD ROM Documentary Volume, "NATO in the Balkans", will be published until the end of 2000.
[2] Copies of these documents can be found also in the United States: The National Security Archive, Washington, RADD Collection; The Library of Congress, Manuscript Division; The Hoover Archives, Stanford University.
[3] Bulgarian Counterintelligence Report, 23 February 1988, Archive of the Ministry of the Interior [AMVR], Sofia, Fond (record group) 1, Opis (inventory) 11a, A. E. (file) 486, pp. 160-161.
[4] “CC BCP Politburo Resolution No. 1071", 26 December 1984, pp. 1-3, - Central State Archive [TsDA], Sofia, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A. E. 1025-85.
[5] Protocol of Sofia PCC meeting, 23 October 1985, pp. 1-5; Information from Petar Mladenov, Bulgarian foreign minister, to Politburo, 27 October 1985, pp. 1-12; T. Zhivkov’s estimate of the results of the PCC meeting, given before the Politburo discussion, 30 October 1985, pp. 1-4. - TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 1025-85.
[6] In March 1986, Gorbachev informed confidentially a CPSU Politburo session about ideological differences with such “conservative” allies as Erich Honecker – Russian State Archives of Contemporary History [RGANI] , Moscow, Fond 89, Opis 36, D. 18, p. 1.
[7] “PCC WP meeting in Budapest file”, 16 June 1986, TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 690-86.
[8] “Information from P. Mladenov to CC BCP Politburo on Vienna Summit results”, 14 March 1989, TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 26-89.
[9] This Joint Security Information Database network [named SOUD] started to operate in early 1980s. Its location was in Moscow and until 1989 SOUD was a valuable source for exchange of operative information among the Eastern European security services.
[10] In this memorandum, Petar Mladenov noted that for the first time in the twelve years of CMFA’s history a host country representative [GDR] adopted a “particular, reserved approach” with regard to the international situation. Mladenov correctly presumed that there were confidential advance contacts between the GDR and Romanian leaders to coordinate a common position against perestroika. On 30 March 1989 Ceauşescu raised before the East German leadership the question of the “contradictory processes in Hungary and Poland.” In a response, the SED CC expressed “the same concern.” Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv [SAPMO-BA], Berlin, IV Z/2035/52.
[11] Securitas Imperii, 4/I, Sborník k problematice bezpečnostních služeb, Prague, 1998, Doc. 1-109. Securitas Imperii, 4/I, Sborník k problematice bezpečnostních služeb, Prague, 1998, Doc. 1-109. Securitas Imperii, 4/I, Sborník k problematice bezpečnostních služeb, Prague, 1998, Doc. 1-109.
[12] Jordan Baev, “Bulgaria and the Political Crises in Czechoslovakia and Poland", Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 96-101.
[13] Exactly two weeks later, during the WP PCC meeting in Bucharest, Gorbachev maintained a separate confidential meeting with Mladenov, Bulgarian Foreign Minister, and Gen. Djurov, Bulgarian Defense Minister, in order to impulse the process for radical change of Bulgarian leadership. This fact was confirmed at our Cold War in the Balkans workshop in May 2000 in Plovdiv by Dr. E. Alexandrov, head of Foreign Minister’s office in that time. Exactly two weeks later, during the WP PCC meeting in Bucharest, Gorbachev maintained a separate confidential meeting with Mladenov, Bulgarian Foreign Minister, and Gen. Djurov, Bulgarian Defense Minister, in order to impulse the process for radical change of Bulgarian leadership. This fact was confirmed at our Cold War in the Balkans workshop in May 2000 in Plovdiv by Dr. E. Alexandrov, head of Foreign Minister’s office in that time. Exactly two weeks later, during the WP PCC meeting in Bucharest, Gorbachev maintained a separate confidential meeting with Mladenov, Bulgarian Foreign Minister, and Gen. Djurov, Bulgarian Defense Minister, in order to impulse the process for radical change of Bulgarian leadership. This fact was confirmed at our Cold War in the Balkans workshop in May 2000 in Plovdiv by Dr. E. Alexandrov, head of Foreign Minister’s office in that time.
[14] “Some considerations and remarks”, 31 May 1989, pp. 68, 69-76 - TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 100-89.
[15] SAPMO-BA, Berlin, IV Z/2035/52. The telegram from the GDR Ambassador in Bucharest Plaschke to East Berlin is identical with the same cipher telegram (still classified), sent by the Bulgarian Minister in the Romanian capital, Nikolov, to Sofia.
[16] “Some preliminary considerations on the situation in Poland", 22 August 1989, p. 21 - TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 170-89 “Some preliminary considerations on the situation in Poland", 22 August 1989, p. 21 - TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 170-89 “Some preliminary considerations on the situation in Poland", 22 August 1989, p. 21 - TsDA, Fond 1-B, Opis 35, A.E. 170-89
[17] Information on the Budapest meeting of the Group “for the issues related to the improvement of the mechanism of cooperation within the Warsaw Pact” , 5 March 1990, Diplomatic Archive, Sofia, Opis 47-10, A.E. 34, p. 10.
[18] Information on the “Temporary Governmental Plenipotentiary Representatives Commission” meeting in Sofia, 19 September 1990 Information on the “Temporary Governmental Plenipotentiary Representatives Commission” meeting in Sofia, 19 September 1990 Information on the “Temporary Governmental Plenipotentiary Representatives Commission” meeting in Sofia, 19 September 1990, ibid., p. 32-35.
[19] Memo re: a conversation with Hungarian Minister in Sofia, 22 October 1990, ibid., Opis 47-10, A.E. 27, pp. 8, 18-19.
[20] Protocol for the Termination of the Defense Agreements Concluded within the Warsaw Treaty and Liquidation of Its Military Bodies and Structures, Budapest, 25 February 1991, ibid., Opis 48-10, A.E. 38, pp. 22-26.
