THE FIFTH MAN 367preserve the ‘socialist basis’ of the East European states, but not in the
dominating fashion that Kissinger was hinting at.^19
Maybe Kissinger was just trying to entice Gorbachëv into showing
his hand. Perhaps. But later he claimed to have meant what he said –
and he added that he had only been trying to help Gorbachëv.^20 He
failed to understand that perestroika derived from a fresh understand-
ing of global politics.^21 Gorbachëv told his officials: ‘Kissinger absolutely
can’t rid himself of his reactionary ideas. He’s stuck in the past.’^22
As he explained to the Politburo on 24 January, he was loath to
waste the political credit that he had accumulated in Western Europe.^23
Soviet foreign policy had to be demonstrably void of menace. Eastern
Europe remained problematic. He asked the Central Committee’s
newly formed commission on the region to formulate a policy based on
the maintenance of a ‘socialist basis’. His conversation with Kissinger
highlighted the need to plan for ‘how we’ll act if the Hungarian People’s
Republic moves off into the European Union’.^24 This was astonishingly
new ground for debate. Gorbachëv was facing up to the reality that
‘our friends’ wished to enter the European Economic Community. In
Hungary, communist radicals under Miklós Németh were rising
in strength and appeal in contrast with the elderly Kádár. Gorbachëv
described them, exaggeratedly, as ‘an oppositionist party’ and wanted
to encourage them.^25 This was an extraordinary idea in the light of
the USSR’s invasion in 1956. Gorbachëv knew that difficult decisions
lay ahead: ‘We, comrades, stand before some very serious things. We
simply can’t give them more than we’re now giving. And they need new
technology. If we don’t sort this out, there’ll be a split and they’ll run
off.’ Gorbachëv rejected the idea of reducing energy supplies to Eastern
Europe: ‘This would be betrayal.’^26
The Soviet economy still awaited transformation, and Gorbachëv
prodded the Defence Ministry to arrange to make military technology
available to the civilian sector. He wanted Yazov to complete a full plan
inside two months.^27 He recognized that the implementation might
disrupt production and cause ‘social tensions’. In the initial projected
stage, merely three out of a possible 1,700 factories would undergo
demilitarization.^28 The budget was rewritten to pay for the expected
costs of transformation.^29 The year 1989 was the first since the 1920s
when the financial outlay for the armed forces failed to increase.^30
Leaders of military industry such as Oleg Baklanov were usually
obstructive about reforms, but this was one that had their approval.