ABSTRACT
Party journals were replete with articles about the need to persuade the party and the public of the correctness of the GDR's policy as outlined by Erich Honecker in his speech before regional party secretaries. A conspicuous silence about Mikhail Gorbachev's calls for "openness" and "democratization" was accompanied by fulsome praise for the GDR's own "achievements and successes." Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze's visit to East Berlin on February 3 and 4 gave little indication of Soviet dissatisfaction with the GDR's economic system. The Brezhnev era, being criticized in the Soviet Union, had been the period during which the GDR began to enjoy its first substantial economic and social achievements. The GDR's economic performance seemed to save the sed from having to embark upon any course of reform. According to Erich Honecker, the GDR's high growth rates were "only made possible by the process of economic intensification introduced and implemented at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties."
