402 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
guaranteed majority in the Sejm, secured his own re-election as
President, albeit by only one vote. He then nominated Minister of
Internal Affairs General Czesław Kiszczak as Prime Minister. Kiszczak
was notorious among Poles as a practitioner of repression, and he and
Jaruzelski aimed to seek a way out of the political emergency by offer-
ing minor concessions to Solidarity in return for the continuation of
communist rule. This was not an outcome that Solidarity felt inclined
to accept.^7
Soviet leaders recognized that they had for too long failed to focus
their gaze on Eastern Europe. Gorbachëv had a pile of preoccupations
in internal and external policy and Shevardnadze sped around the
world on ministerial business. According to the records of their aides,
neither of them had anticipated the final anticommunist crisis in
Poland during those long, hot months.^8 The Polish electoral result had
taken the party leadership in the Kremlin entirely by surprise – and
the same seems to have been true of the KGB and the Foreign Affairs
Ministry. But Gorbachëv refused to interfere; he made clear that he
would never endorse a reproduction of the Chinese methods in
Warsaw or sanction military intervention from abroad. Poland’s com-
munists had lost and had to cope with the consequences.^9
When Shevardnadze met Honecker on 9 June 1989, he concen-
trated on the ‘crisis’ in the USSR rather than the extraordinary
situation in Poland. He focused on the idea of the necessity of
perestroika. However difficult it was to conduct the Soviet reforms, he
wanted the East German leader to understand that the Politburo had
no option but to bring them to completion. He told of how millions of
people, including pensioners, were living below the poverty line. He
remarked on the dire situation in housing. He added that the old party
leadership had made a primitive error in declaring the national ques-
tion solved once and for all. He admitted that ‘demagogic’ criticisms
were on the rise, but he expressed faith in the party’s ability to retain
control of the situation. Honecker as usual omitted to criticize Gor-
bachëv’s record, preferring to boast about East Germany’s industrial
achievements. His concerns lay with the movement of events through-
out Eastern Europe. He said that if things were called by their real
name, the Polish Communist Party had suffered defeat at the hands of
Solidarity. In Hungary, things were moving in the same direction.
Honecker was adamant that Poland should not be ‘lost’; he also urged
the need to prevent a split in the Hungarian Communist Party.^10
On 7 July Gorbachëv reinforced this analysis when addressing the