72 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
production! Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic
sat together as beer producers; Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania as
specialists in viticulture; Poland and the USSR as distillers of vodka.
Sometimes it was decided that a relaxed atmosphere would be facili-
tated by convening in some holiday resort in Crimea. This was the
point: once they had delivered their compulsory reports they relaxed
in each other’s company and chatted ‘heart to heart’ on a confidential
basis.^37
When Brezhnev reported on his Crimean sojourn to the Politburo
on 9 September 1982, he harped on familiar themes. The East Euro-
peans had moaned about the under-delivery of Soviet products while
acknowledging that they remained heavily in debt to the USSR as well
as to Western creditors. Brezhnev argued that only greater regional
integration of the economies would bring about improvement.^38
When the USSR convoked a meeting with Central Committee sec-
retaries from six Warsaw Pact countries, they frankly recognized that
loans from the West were at the fulcrum of their difficulties. Soviet
leaders wished to keep political and military dominion over Eastern
Europe. They would have liked to have added economic control, but
their own financial resources were stretched to the maximum. While
warning about the dangers of indebtedness to Western banks, they
could not step into the breach.^39 The alternative was too dreadful for
them to contemplate. Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu was the exception
as he repaid his Western loans at the expense of his people’s standard of
living. At the June 1983 Party Central Committee plenum, Andropov
yet again proposed greater economic integration inside the Warsaw
Pact, arguing that this would benefit each economy.^40 As regards
friendly countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, he preferred to
terminate subsidies and make them responsible for their own eco-
nomic development. The USSR no longer had the resources to sustain
its activities in Eastern Europe or more widely in the world. Not wish-
ing to finish on a pessimistic note, he still managed to declare that
world capitalism was undergoing a ‘deepening of [its] general crisis’.^41
When the topic had come up at a meeting of East European party
secretaries in mid-1979, the Bulgarian Dmitri Stanishev abandoned
the usual euphemisms and called things by their names:
What kind of coordination? . . . People need to be fed and dressed
and to live as well as in the German Federal Republic, for example.
In that eventuality there’d be no need for ideological coordination.