Editorial introduction

The end of a relationship. An attempt to interpret the minutes (János M. Rainer)

1. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by János Kádár on his visit to Moscow on March 12–13, 1985

2a. Minutes of the meeting in Moscow between János Kádár and Mikhail Gorbachev on September 25, 1985.

2b. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by János Kádár on his visit to Moscow on September 24–5, 1985

3. Report to the HSWP Political Committee on the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (extract)

4. Report to the HSWP Political Committee on the visit by Mikhail Gorbachev to Budapest on June 8–9, 1986

5. Verbal briefing by János Kádár on his talks with Mikhail Gorbachev on November 10–12, 1986 at the CMEA summit meeting (extract from the minutes of the HSWP Political Committee meeting on November 18, 1986)

6. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by Károly Grósz on his visit to Moscow on July 17–18, 1987

7. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by János Kádár on his visit to Moscow on October 31–November 8, 1987 (extract)

8. Telephone conversation between János Kádár and Mikhail Gorbachev on May 19, 1988

9a. Minutes of the meeting in Moscow between Mikhail Gorbachev and Károly Grósz on July 5, 1988

9b. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by Károly Grósz on his visit to Moscow on July 4–5, 1988

10a. Minutes of the meeting in Moscow between Mikhail Gorbachev and Miklós Németh on March 3, 1989

10b. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by Miklós Németh on his visit to Moscow on March 2–3, 1989

11. Report to the HSWP Political Committee by Károly Grósz on his visit to Moscow on March 23–4, 1989

12. Report to the HSWP Political Executive Committee on the meeting between Rezső Nyers and Mikhail Gorbachev in Bucharest on July 7–8, 1989

13. Report to the HSWP Political Executive Committee on the visit to Moscow by Rezső Nyers and Károly Grósz on July 24–5, 1989

1. Memorandum by Ambassador Sándor Rajnai for the HSWP Central Committee: Some important aspects of our bilateral relations, April 1987

2. Memorandum by Vadim Medvedev for Mikhail Gorbachev, March 1988

3. Memorandum of the talks in Moscow between Vadim Zagladin and Gyula Thürmer, August 1988

4. Memorandum of the talks in Moscow between Vadim Zagladin and János Berecz, September 7, 1988

5. Memorandum of the talks in Moscow between Vadim Zagladin and György Aczél, September 8, 1988

6. Memorandum of the talks in Moscow between Vadim Zagladin and Gyula Horn, September 8, 1988

7. Report to the HSWP Political Committee on the visit to Moscow by a delegation of the HSWP Central Committee Department of International Party Relations on December 19–21, 1988

8. Memorandum by the CPSU Central Committee International Department for Aleksandr Yakovlev: The main issues in relations with the European socialist countries, February 1989

9. Memorandum by the World-System Institute of the Scientific Academy of the Soviet Union for Aleksandr Yakovlev: The changes occurring in Eastern Europe and their effect on the Soviet Union, February 1989

10. Memorandum by Georgy Shakhnazarov for Mikhail Gorbachev on the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, October 14, 1989

11. Memorandum by Georgy Shakhnazarov for Mikhail Gorbachev on the projected summit meeting of leaders of the Warsaw Treaty countries, November 14, 1989

12. Memorandum by Georgy Shakhnazarov for Mikhail Gorbachev on the projected summit meeting of leaders of the Warsaw Treaty countries, November 28, 1989

13. Memorandum of the CPSU Central Committee International Department: Towards a new concept of relations between the Soviet Union and the Central and Eastern European states, January 5, 1990

14. Submission by the KGB to the CPSU Central Committee, February 20, 1990

15. Memorandum by Georgy Shakhnazarov for Mikhail Gorbachev on the meeting of the Military Council of the Warsaw Treaty, April 10, 1990

16. Memorandum by Georgy Shakhnazarov for Mikhail Gorbachev on the preparations for the meeting of the Political Advisory Body of the Warsaw Treaty, May 4, 1990

17. Memorandum by Vadim Zagladin for Mikhail Gorbachev: On the Central European situation and certain aspects of our policy, October 1990

18. Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee Secretariat: On the situation in Central Europe and our policy in this region, January 22, 1991

Joint statement of the Political Advisory Council of the Warsaw Treaty, February 25, 1991

Minutes of the dissolution of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, June 28, 1991

Minutes of the cessation of the effect of the Warsaw Treaty, July 1, 1991

List of abbreviations

Participants in the negotiations

Index

 

This publication appears thanks to an international programme that set out after 1989 to open the Central European and Russian archives and make the documents in them accessible. The Cold-War International History Project of the Washington National Security Archive and the Woodrow Wilson Center organized a series of conferences in the 1990s on the history of the Cold War. The discussions usually analysed the course of a specific Cold-War crisis, helped in every case by a fat volume of freshly declassified (rassekrechen) documents. Indeed the most enduring legacy of the talks held during the Cuban missile crisis, the 1953 East Berlin uprising, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1968 Prague Spring, or the Polish Solidarity movement may be the documentation, running sometimes to several thousand pages, which Moscow and other archives proffered in this way to the international community of contemporary historians. In 1998, the first, relatively exclusive ‘critical oral-history conference’ was held in Musgrove, Georgia, on the subject of Soviet foreign policy in the Gorbachev period and the end of the Cold War. An even larger quantity of Soviet documents was made available for this conference, primarily from the personal papers of the last Soviet party general secretary, which are held in the Gorbachev Archive in Moscow. Large quantities of documents were again made available when further conferences took place in the following year in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw, to mark the tenth anniversary of the changes of system in Central and Eastern Europe.

The way the researches and analyses focused primarily on the moment of change gave the compilers of this volume the idea of trying, through the documents, to follow the process whose culmination had caused the main excitement hitherto: the process of crisis and collapse of the communist system. It concerned the crisis and last agonies of a system that had been introduced into Hungary from above, by Soviet influence. It contained one untouchable, unmentionable factor that could not be analysed: the role of the ‘fraternal Soviet Union’. Furthermore, the changes in the Soviet Union had surely affected the outcome of its crisis. The trends in international scholarship coincided fortunately with some legislative activity in Hungary. The act on archives passed in 1996 provided essentially unlimited access for researchers to the documents of the party-state period, including the foreign-policy documents.

The question inevitable presents itself of whether it is possible to depict events in a historical way after only a decade has elapsed. Does the time that has passed offer an adequate vantage point and if the sources are available in principle, have they been examined in sufficient quantity to provide a basis for such a depiction? To take the first question, a distance of a decade would not, under ‘normal’ circumstances, justify making even a relatively valid historical analysis. However, 1989–90 was not just an average historical turning point. A sense of finality and closure appeared with great force in the change-of-system years, in the events and on people’s lips, while the continuity of the ‘deep currents’ were also sensed and experienced by a very significant proportion of Hungarian society. However, the situation is exceptional with the sources. A high proportion of the archive sources for 1989, the most important year of the systemic change in Hungary, are already accessible and many have been published. For instance, one can read the minutes of the Opposition Round Table, coordinating the political activity of opposition forces striving for democracy, those of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party Central Committee for 1989 (and 1988), exercising power, and those of the National Round Table plenary meetings, discussing the transition. Many source materials have also appeared on the background to the most influential mass demonstration of that year, the funeral of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs. This volume sets out to continue the same task. It offers ‘raw material’ for future analysis and confronts the public discussion of the crisis and fall of the communist system, which is not devoid of banalities and misconceptions, with documents with the force of proof. These considerations led to the idea of presenting the process leading up to the changes of 1989–90 through the documents, focusing the picture on the ‘key players’, at the helm of government at the time, and on Mikhail Gorbachev, certainly the decisive figure of those years, if an enigmatic one.

The book falls into three parts. The first unit contains the notes taken between the funeral of Konstantin Chernenko and the Hungarian-Soviet bilateral summit of July 1989. Altogether 15 documents are included from 12 occasions, since for three meetings, in 1985, 1988 and 1989, both Soviet and Hungarian sources are available. In the other cases, only the Hungarian side’s version is known.

The Soviet side took what were known as condensed minutes of the meetings. A member of Gorbachev’s staff recorded the proceedings in a dialogue obviously much shorter than what was actually said. However, the account included the essential questions covered and suggesting at least the turns of phrase—through the Russian translation, of course, in the case of the Hungarian side. These three sets of minutes, found in the Gorbachev Archive in Moscow, are published in full.

The Hungarian side did not keep such minutes. There had been occasions in the 1950s and 1960s when similar records of talks by party and state delegations were kept, but only summaries survive for the Soviet-Hungarian summit meetings of the 1980s. These were penned by the interpreters and advisers to János Kádár, Károly Grósz etc. for the information of the party Political Committee, or in 1989, the Political Committee and the government. In general, Political Committee members were only given a chance to read the reports of the discussions, which might also be made available to Central Committee members in an abbreviated form. However, in most cases, the Central Committee simply received a verbal briefing, which it would normally accept without debate. (The Soviet ‘minutes’ were kept in the Gorbachev Archives. Similar information was probably prepared for the members of the Moscow Politburo, but these are not accessible.) For some meetings, no briefing for the Political Committee was found and none may have been written, in which case an information document deriving from one level lower has been included. Where several Hungarian documents are available (reports to the Political Committee and the Central Committee, or an oral comment or account to the Central Committee), only the highest-ranking of them has been included. All the Hungarian documents are in the party-document collection of the Hungarian National Archives, where their degree of confidentially has been downgraded over their full length, so that they are accessible to researchers. The general aim has been completeness, with the exception of documents with a mixed content: Central Committee minutes, party congress reports, or reports of multilateral international meetings of bodies such as the Warsaw Treaty organization or Comecon. There, only the parts of documents concerning top-level bilateral discussion are included in the book.

The ‘summit meeting’ is the central concept of the first editorial unit. The deciding factor in what constituted a summit was the presence of Gorbachev, initially as party general secretary and later as head of state as well. His negotiating partner until the summer of 1987 was János Kádár. Thereafter, there were two occasions on which Gorbachev had extensive discussions with the Hungarian prime minister—with Károly Grósz in the summer of 1987 and with Miklós Németh in the spring of 1989. Both occasions show that the Soviets (naturally) were aware of the changes in the informal hierarchy of power in Hungary and the greater political weight accruing to the Hungarian head of government than was customary. Otherwise, under ‘normal’ conditions, documentation of bilateral talks between prime ministers has not been included, because the subject matter was confined to economic affairs. The political importance of the economy increased in the 1980s rather than declined, but the two countries took (or failed to take) the most important economic decisions on that level.

The second unit contains so-called background materials. There are huge quantities of such documents to be found in Hungarian archives, whose inclusion (for instance, those concerning prime ministerial negotiations) would have exceeded the bounds of one volume. As with the summit meetings, the personality of Gorbachev is the reference point. Most of the background materials passed through his hands, having been written for him or his closest associates. The two exceptions are rare cases in which Hungarian documents reflect the stance and attitude towards Hungary and the region taken by ‘second-rank’ Soviet negotiating partners.

There is an appendix containing a few documents that concern the abolition in 1991 of the common political, military and economic institutions of the so-called socialist camp, short biographical data on the participants in the summit meetings and background discussions, and an index of names.

The Russian-language documents were translated by the compilers, except where marked at the end of the document, along with any previous publication in Hungarian. The Hungarian-language documents are reproduced letter for letter, and so far as possible, in their original form (with original reference numbers and grades, such as ‘strictly confidential’). This practice has not been followed with the Russian documents because Gorbachev Foundation Archives store the documents on magnetic discs and make them available to researchers in that form.

Budapest, June 2000

The Editors