ABSTRACT
The topic moment in the transformation of Central-Eastern Europe took place in summer 1988. Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, announced an acceleration of perestroika at the 19th Party Conference on September 30. In his report to the Conference, that was published in Pravda on June 28, Gorbachev affirmed the freedom by the Central-Eastern European countries (CEECs) to choose their sociopolitical regime as a universal principle in the relation among allied countries.1 The announcement amounted de facto to the repudiation of the so-called “Brezhnev doctrine” (Lévesque 1997).
