392 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Department. The outbreak of East European revolutions meant that
communist parties in that whole half of the continent stopped contrib-
uting to the fund. (By then, of course, it was they who needed financial
support from Moscow.) Falin reported that seventy-three ‘communist,
workers’ and revolutionary-democratic parties and organizations’
around the world remained in receipt of Soviet beneficence.^9 Direct
grants were not the only way of subsidizing the world’s communist
parties. The USSR agreed to buy large quantities of their newspapers:
forty-two countries benefited from this kind of subvention. The prob-
lem was that the Soviet authorities could no longer afford a regular
annual outlay of 4.5 million rubles in foreign currency. The Party
Secretariat pointed out that readers in the perestroika years had little
need for such newspapers now that Pravda was cheaper, more inform-
ative and available on the date of publication. Censure was expected
from communist parties that were dependent on the Moscow subsidy.
But savings had to be made.^10
Whenever geopolitical dilemmas arose, party officials passed them
on to the highest level for decision. Reagan and Shultz regularly
in dicated their concerns about Soviet political and economic interven-
tion in southern Africa, Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Libya. Since
the 1970s the Soviet Union had been providing them with credits,
weaponry and advisers. The American administration treated this as
an intolerable effort to expand the Kremlin’s global power. The USSR’s
budgetary difficulties worsened because of its external commitments.
Something had to give.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs led the way in revising official
thinking. Adamishin had long believed in the need for a change in
policy towards southern Africa. He was an acknowledged expert in
African affairs, and the freedom of thought under Shevardnadze
emboldened him to speak his mind. During the long years of Brezh-
nev’s general secretaryship it was a tenet of Soviet foreign policy that
the USSR’s duty lay in devoting financial resources to the various
armed struggles against apartheid in South Africa and against the gov-
ernments in the neighbouring regions that were backed by Pretoria.
Adamishin thought this intolerably expensive as well as damaging to
the interests of rapprochement with America. The fact that Castro, with
a Moscow subsidy, had installed thousands of Cuban troops in Angola
confused the situation. Gorbachëv sympathized with Adamishin’s
ideas, which fitted with his own about global affairs. On 27 November
1987 he discussed them with Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. The Soviet