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Gorbachev's Ulterior Objectives in Warsaw
| Article
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11519 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
266 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
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The firm statement of support for the Brezhnev Doctrine by Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Polish Communist Party congress at the end of June should not be taken entirely at face value. Although the Soviet Union might intervene militarily in the future to defend a faltering Soviet satellite, the excessively firm statement almost surely had two ulterior objectives.
The first objective was to attempt to neutralize the widespread passive opposition to General Wojciech Jaruzelski. If it were certain that the Soviet Union would have stepped in, the general's defense for the crushing of Solidarity - to save Poland from a worse fate - might have had some credibility with the Polish public. In fact, however, military intervention was doubtful.
If Jaruzelski indeed had been a polish patriot, he might have used martial law to get rid both of the extreme elements in Solidarity and of the Communist Party hard-liners. As long as even a liberal Communist Party was in charge and Poland's commitment to the Warsaw Pact was not challenged, it is doubtful that a Soviet Union that was hard-pressed in Afghanistan and that knew some Polish divisions would resist would have invaded Poland. Anyone who knew how Jaruzelski's secret agents worked as provocateurs inside Solidarity and who saw him strutting with great pride in his subsequent visit to Moscow would be confident that Jaruzelski is a committed communist, not a patriotic Pole.
The second reason for the statement was self-protective camouflage for a Soviet party secretary whose modest efforts at reform were still meeting strong
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