ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, Poland had been the center of a wide-ranging debate, about the stability of communism, but about the stability of European geopolitics. The connection between Russia and central Europe lay in the intellectual challenge to the doctrine about the irreversibility of history, communism, and Soviet control. Hungary had adopted a gradual economic liberalization from the 1970s, allowed the establishment of small-scale private enterprises, and encouraged the inflow of foreign capital; and, like Poland, ran into a debt crisis in the early 1980s. It tried to tackle the crisis by joining the International Monetary Fund and was acutely worried that the Soviet Union might try to restrict this assertion of economic independence of the Comecon countries. On December 2, 1989, United States President George Bush and Gorbachev met on the Russian ship Maxim Gorky, in stormy seas off the coast of Malta. This was the meeting which its participants believed ended the Cold War.
