ABSTRACT
Two important developments of the late 1960s, one in the attitude of the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin and the other in the area of East-West relations, are important for understanding the general international political context of the 1970s. The invasion of Czechoslovakia ended the ‘viability’ phase of Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. It was the period of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, which justified intervention, as in 1968, to prevent socialism in any particular country and in the socialist community as a whole being threatened. East Germany remained a tightly controlled communist state throughout the 1970s: a single-party dictatorship, severe political discipline, involving censorship, and a ubiquitous surveillance of the public by the secret police were the basis of the regime. Albania remained a completely isolated Stalinist dictatorship in the 1980s. The political instability in Poland in the 1980s gave rise to the belief that Poland’s main problem was a lack of political authority.
