The Baltic and Eastern Europe

I have been very pleased with your extensive coverage this year of the rapid changes occurring in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union concerning both domestic and foreign policy. Several times, however, I have been bothered by historical inaccuracies in articles discussing the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine.

The idea of limited sovereignty (circumscribed by the U.S.S.R.) in Eastern Europe does not stem solely from Brezhnev’s justification of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In fact, limited sovereignty has been implicit in communist relations since the Communist International (Comintern) creation in 1919. Its definition of a socialist commonwealth presupposes that the community’s larger interests necessarily transcend those of its national components. Centralization and subordination to a “strong guiding center” was one of the organization’s charter “Twenty-One Points” in 1920. The only thing unique about Brezhnev and the 1968 invasion was that Brezhnev felt compelled by improving relations with the West to explicitly codify a long-standing principle. In contrast, Khrushchev, who in 1956 invaded Hungary, felt no compunction whatsoever to justify his behavior.

One cannot really assert that Gorbachev has renounced the limited sovereignty principle because one of its fundamentals has yet to be tested. While the Communist Party’s “leading role in society” is changing in Poland, and perhaps soon in Hungary as well, neither nation has taken steps to leave the Warsaw Pact. There are still strong economic, political, and symbolic ties that bind Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s non-interference policy in Eastern Europe does not constitute a renunciation of limited sovereignty.

Where does the Soviet Union’s threshold of tolerance for diversity and reform in Eastern Europe now lie? Historically, the answer has depended . . . on the geostrategic importance of the particular Soviet ally in question (contrast the Soviet reaction to the Romanian deviation with the Czechoslovakia invasion in the same time period). The prevailing ideology among policy-makers in the U.S.S.R. has played an equally strong role.

ELIZABETH NEWTON

Dept. of Political Science

and Soviet Studies

UC Berkeley