CRACKS IN THE ICE: EASTERN EUROPE 75Brezhnev paid an official visit in 1975 with a view towards salvaging
warmer links with Romania. Boris Ponomarëv, head of the Party
International Department, appeared at a Politburo meeting and asked
that official statements should become less indulgent to Ceauşescu.
Brezhnev demurred and told him: ‘Drop it, drop it! As regards theory
and all theoretical matters, we’ve fallen behind him. We ought to try
and catch up with him: he’s an iron Stalinist!’^53 The Soviet leaders
would have preferred Ceauşescu to stay quiet. But so long as he stayed
inside the Warsaw Pact and promoted some form of the one-party
communist state, they left him alone.
Enver Hoxha’s Albania, on the other hand, had left the Pact in
1968 and sided with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The USSR
accepted this as a fait accompli. Stalin had expelled Tito’s Yugoslavia
from the Soviet Bloc in 1948 even before the Warsaw Pact was created,
calculating that this would soon bring the troublesome Tito to heel.
The opposite occurred. While enforcing one-party communist rule,
Tito thumbed his nose at Stalin and turned to the West for financial
credits; he also introduced reforms that gave much freedom to Yugo-
slav workers to influence how their enterprises were managed.
Yugoslavia was one of the founders of the global non-aligned move-
ment which refused allegiance to either the USSR or America. Neither
Stalin nor his successors could bring the country under control, and
the same proved true with Albania. Moscow took a dispassionate view
on this. The Albanian authorities remained committed to communism
and were never likely to threaten Soviet geopolitical interests.
The USSR could never take East European approval for granted in
the big questions of foreign policy – and not just on the part of the
Romanians, Yugoslavs and Albanians. Minds were concentrated on the
consequences for the region if nuclear war broke out. The Soviet lead-
ership always had to prove its readiness to negotiate with the Americans.
Even the USSR’s ‘peace policy’ required regular defence. Gromyko
found that he had to justify Soviet foreign policy even to the Czecho-
slovak communist leadership. Husák held power in Prague from 1969
only because the USSR had chosen him, and he never openly opposed
its objectives in international relations. But the Kremlin wanted more
than passive support from the client kingdoms of its ‘outer empire’.
For this to happen, Husák and his associates needed to become con-
vinced. On 23 March 1982, for example, Gromyko tried to persuade
Czechoslovak Foreign Affairs Minister Bohuslav Chňoupek that the
Soviet Union had modernized its weaponry only after the Americans