ABSTRACT
The author was in Prague on January 28, 1987, the day after Mikhail Gorbachev’s major speech “On Reorganization and the Party’s Personnel Policy” to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Ever since the Red Army reached the region at the end of World War II, Eastern Europe has occupied a special place in Soviet foreign policy. Gorbachev’s language seems less threatening than Brezhnev’s, but neither in this speech nor in other statements is there any indication of change from past Soviet assumptions, habits, and expectations. In the realm of politics and ideology too, it is mainly in times of tension between the superpowers that the East Europeans voice most strongly their concern for pan-European cooperation. Fear of losing control over Eastern Europe is the main reason Soviet policy has long sought to isolate and intimidate rather than to seduce Western Europe, especially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
