ABSTRACT
Two of the senior political figures of Eastern Europe approach their retirement after having achieved a degree of apparent popular approval unparalleled among leaders of those Communist regimes imposed by Soviet force. Hella Pick wrote in the Guardian in 1984: ‘Today, János Kádár knows that even in free elections against other candidates, he would be certain to emerge the victor’.1 ‘The citizens of the other German state’, remarked Theo Sommer in Die Zeit in 1986, ‘display something almost like quiet reverence’ toward Erich Honecker.2
