316 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
recognize that the people’s hatred of Jaruzelski’s administration was
nigh universal. What he and the rest of the Soviet leadership did rec-
ognize was the scale of the economic emergency. On 23 October 1986
Ryzhkov gave a report to the Politburo. Poland was deep in debt, Hun-
gary perched on the edge of ruin. Soviet credits were saving Bulgaria
from disaster. But none of them genuinely wanted to integrate their
economies with the Soviet Union. They looked exclusively to Western
banks for their salvation. Foreign loans were really a trap for them, but
they still hoped to buy valuable electronic technology if they sold
enough natural resources. Ryzhkov was in despair: ‘We don’t have a
concept that is genuinely political-economic.’ Having got that off his
chest, he assured the Politburo that Soviet financial aid was producing a
warmth among Poles about the USSR. Gorbachëv liked what he heard.^5
As Soviet leaders sleepwalked towards a crisis in Eastern Europe,
Valentin Falin forwarded a paper by the analyst Rem Belousov who
predicted that the countries of the Warsaw Pact would enter economic
collapse by around 1989–1990.^6 The Politburo treated the problems as
containable. On 10 November 1986, a month after Reykjavik, Gor-
bachëv called the East European leaders to Moscow, where he admitted
the past mistakes in the region. He stressed that the era of Soviet mili-
tary intervention was definitively over. Every communist state had to
render itself accountable to its citizens.^7 Bulgaria’s General Secretary
Todor Zhivkov exclaimed: ‘This is the first time that the [Communist
Party of the Soviet Union] has spoken about itself like this.’ Ceauşescu
was less generous. He found nothing good to say about the Soviet
perestroika and claimed that Romania had undertaken its own suc-
cessful reforms. (In reporting this to the Politburo, Gorbachëv scoffed
at Ceauşescu’s ‘dynastic socialism’.) The Vietnamese and Cubans were
also present at the gathering, and Castro pleaded for the return of
General Kurochkin as military adviser to the Cuban contingent
in Angola. Jaruzelski exuded a confidence that he would win out in
Poland. Kádár spoke with noticeably less panache, but Gorbachëv kept
faith in him as he did even in Husák. He looked forward to success for
communism in the USSR and in Eastern Europe.^8
Gorbachëv gave a rousing account to the Politburo about the
eagerness of East European leaders to start a perestroika in their own
countries. The reality was that none of them was keen. Ceauşescu con-
tinued to run Romania despotically and Honecker, Husák and Zhivkov
never intended to conduct a serious reform.^9
East Germany gave mounting concern to Moscow. Honecker