74 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
drawing attention to a genuine problem even though they did not like
his practical recommendation. Andropov’s preference was to cross his
fingers and hope for the best. He had no answer to the East German
problem and made no effort to get Honecker removed from office.
Honecker disguised the East German economic malaise through
secret loans raised through Bavarian conservative leader Franz-Josef
Strauss. Gromyko had warned Honecker against this.^47 Honecker took
no notice. In the absence of a subsidy by the USSR, he felt he had no
choice.^48 Soviet leaders, fearing that East Germany was turning into a
dependency of West Germany, aimed at least to prevent the deepening
of trade and financial links between them.^49 Their suspicions about
Honecker were fed by his political rival Willi Stoph, who thought that
he had fallen under the influence of ‘the evil genius’ of his Secretary
for the Economy, Günter Mittag.^50 Whereas Moscow thought nothing
of finalizing agreements with Bonn without consulting East Berlin, it
strenuously objected whenever East Berlin behaved publicly in the
same way. The triangular relationship of the USSR and the two Ger-
manies was in a deep tangle. Moscow expected East Berlin to castigate
Bonn while Moscow itself, for its own reasons, avoided such polemics.
Hermann Axen, one of the East German party secretaries, was too
discreet to raise the matter in front of others; but he let his Soviet com-
rades know how he felt about the hypocrisy.^51
Honecker pretended that he faced no difficulty. Apart from
Ceauşescu, no Warsaw Pact leader was readier to tussle with the Krem-
lin. Moscow by the early 1980s was seeking to increase the amount of
oil and gas it could sell on world markets. Honecker objected to any
diminution in supplies to the German Democratic Republic. When
Soviet officials proved intransigent, he insisted on receiving a written
letter on the matter from Brezhnev himself.
Meanwhile Romania remained an irritant for the Politburo. It
criticized the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and
opposed the USSR’s pretensions to dominance in Eastern Europe. As a
result it gained ‘most favoured nation’ status from America. Ceauşescu
was feted on official visits to the NATO countries. He raised loans
from Western banks. At the same time he imposed one of the most
oppressive communist regimes through labour camps, police surveil-
lance and a cult of his own greatness that blended nationalism and
Marxism-Leninism. He depicted himself as the protector of Romanian
independence.^52 Nevertheless a modicum of fraternal relations was
kept with the USSR despite the harshness of Bucharest’s rhetoric.