The Anoshkin Notebook on the Polish Crisis, December 1981

98 COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT BULLETIN 11
their actions which had saved the Czechoslovak people
from a “counterrevolution” and had prevented an
inevitable Western intervention. <strong>The</strong>y firmly maintained
this position in front of representatives of Western
Communist Parties who had opposed the military action in
Czechoslovakia as well. During the extremely controversial
and long discussions with the head of the International
Department of the Italian Communist Party, Carlo Galuzi, on
16 September 1968, the BCP leaders repeated many times:
“We do not consider that our interference was a mistake.
We believe that by our intervention undertaken in a timely
manner, we terminated the dangerous process of
counterrevolution which could have only ended with a
victory of the counterrevolution and in no other way…
That could have been a dreadful flaw in the defense of the
Socialist camp in Europe….” 15 Five years later Zhivkov
maintained the same view in his talks with Italian CP leader
Enrico Berlinguer.
<strong>The</strong> position of the Bulgarian Party and State leadership
regarding the 1980-81 Polish Crisis
Until the beginning of August 1980 no particular
concern with the Polish crisis was shown in Bulgaria,
though reports of public discontent and incipient upheaval
had begun circulating. On the eve of Bulgarian Prime
Minister Stanko Todorov’s visit to Poland in July 1980 the
usual memos and references were prepared, one of which
stated: “<strong>The</strong> dissidents are now in fact an insignificant
group of people isolated from society, they have lost their
public influence, are people disunited from inward
struggles…<strong>The</strong> people are in a state of sound moral and
political unity…Poland is a strong socialist unit….” After
his official visit on July 14-15, Todorov, in a report to the
BCP CC Politburo, declared: “ I believe that the Party and
State leadership in Poland, with regard to their current
economic problems, are approaching the complicated
problems with a sense of realism and are taking active
steps to overcome them, taking into consideration the
working people’s feelings.” 16 One would hardly assume
that in such confidential documents propaganda clichés
would be deliberately used in place of a real evaluation.
Obviously, at the time Bulgarian ruling circles did not
realize the real social and political situation in Poland. In
August - September 1980, however, the Embassy in
Warsaw sent several informational reports on the changes
in the situation and the formation of the political
opposition to the Communist regime. No doubt, such news
should have reached Sofia from Moscow as well.
On 15 September 1980, Todor ðivkov received
Politburo member Kazimierz Barcikowski who was sent to
Sofia to inform the Bulgarian leaders of the situation in his
country. During that conversation, ðivkov said: “We do
not dramatize the events in Poland but they require all the
socialist countries to draw certain conclusions for
themselves, too.” He added that the Bulgarian leadership
would “follow the development of the matters in Poland”
and concluded: “We, the Socialist countries, work in a
hostile environment and we have to admit that our enemies
won certain points. Your case, one could say, is a link in the
chain of the total imperialistic offensive against us…” 17
Soon after the meeting, ðivkov prepared a special memo on
the matter, and the Polish situation was discussed at two
Politburo sessions, on October 21 and 25. ðivkov also
maintained the hard line of an “offensive against the antisocialist
forces” at the summit meeting of the Warsaw Pact
leaders on 5 December 1980 in Moscow. Following
instructions, the State Security structures became more
active in their “preventive” measures and in their periodic
analyses of the Polish crisis which laid particular stress on
its influence in Bulgaria.
In the first half of 1981, nearly all information coming
from the Bulgarian Embassy in Warsaw referred to the
development of the political crisis. In a memo regarding
bilateral Bulgarian-Polish relations in May 1981, Mariy
Ivanov, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated to
the BCP CC: “In the last ten months relations between the
mass trade unions, youth, women’s and other public
organizations [in both countries] have practically been cut
off…” 18 In a report to the Foreign Ministry, the Bulgarian
ambassador in Poland, Ivan Nedev, related the reaction of a
high ranking Polish army officer: “[We will put up with]
anything rather than Soviet-style socialism!” 19
<strong>The</strong> review of the political and diplomatic documents
on the Polish crisis, compared to other important archival
sources as well, prompts the following conclusions:
Though publicly not as active as his Czechoslovak
and East German colleagues Gust