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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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082889
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08288900.033
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1990-09-17
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WORLD, Page 18Moscow Speaks Softly
Back in 1981, Moscow bristled in near fury at Solidarity. A
"counterrevolution," snapped then Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov.
"A Trojan horse of imperialism!" cried the official media. As the
trade union's protests roiled Poland, Soviet troops massed
threateningly along the countries' common border. Finally, when
General Wojciech Jaruzelski crushed Solidarity with martial law,
TASS said approvingly, "The authorities are taking necessary
measures to restore tranquillity."
How times change. Last week, as a member of Solidarity was
about to become Prime Minister, Soviet officials said simply that
it was an "internal" Polish matter. A Moscow television reporter
noted that "it is necessary to form a new government as quickly as
possible," then ticked off a short list of potential leaders that
included Lech Walesa. The reaction was expected. Visiting Paris in
July, Gorbachev had said, "How the Polish people . . . will decide
to structure their society and lives will be their affair."
The Soviet inaction appeared to sound the death knell for a
policy that took shape under Leonid Brezhnev. After the invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union proclaimed that
socialist countries had the right to invade a fellow socialist
nation whenever the Communist political monopoly was threatened.
The so-called Brezhnev Doctrine justified the tanks rolling into
Prague and, by extension, Nikita Khrushchev's intervention in
Hungary in 1956. But last December, Gorbachev announced that the
"use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of
foreign policy."
Andranik Migranyan, a Soviet intellectual, last week explicitly
condemned the Brezhnev Doctrine in the reformist weekly Moscow
News. Migranyan noted, however, that "the (democratic) processes
going on in (Poland) may be properly understood by the Soviet Union
only when Soviet foreign policy interests are not challenged." No
one knows how Moscow's military hard-liners would have reacted had
Walesa refused to leave the Defense and Interior ministries in
Communist Party hands.
Soviet fears may also have been assuaged in July, when senior
Solidarity leaders invalidated their votes and allowed Jaruzelski
to be installed in the presidency, thus proving that the trade
union was sensitive to geopolitical realities. The Kremlin may have
changed its thinking since 1981, but Solidarity has changed as
well.