Word: pact
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Gorbachev meanwhile journeyed to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a minisummit of his own with the U.S.S.R.'s six Warsaw Pact allies. Though there are serious continuing strains within that alliance (see WORLD), the Soviet chief had no difficulty pulling the East European leaders into line behind Moscow's effort to keep the summit pinpointed on arms control, and in particular on the Soviet attempt at a diplomatic zapping of Star Wars...
Disarray, disability and a death in the Kremlin had forced postponement of the Warsaw Pact's biennial summit meeting for nearly a year. So by the time convoys of ZIL and Chaika limousines were finally streaking through the yellow brick streets of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, the meeting last week was embarrassingly overdue. The Political Consultative Committee, made up of Communist Party leaders from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and the Soviet Union, had been expected to gather in January. But Mikhail Gorbachev's predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko, was too ill to travel then, and indeed died only...
...Sofia summit resulted in little more than Kremlin posturing in advance of Gorbachev's November meeting with Ronald Reagan in Geneva. A 15-page declaration blamed the U.S. for aggravating the arms race and piously declared that since its founding in 1955 as a counterforce to NATO, the Warsaw Pact "has been reliably safeguarding the peaceful constructive labor of the fraternal peoples...
Although it has one-third more manpower than NATO, and twice as much armor and artillery, the pact is evidently under considerable strain. When the signatory nations met last April in Warsaw to formally renew the alliance for 20 more years, Nicolae Ceausescu of Rumania let it be known that he favored an extension of only five years. Many East Europeans view the 535,000 uniformed Soviet soldiers stationed in their countries as an army of occupation. That impression is reinforced by the ultimate control exercised by Soviet officers during military maneuvers, which are conducted four times a year...
...foreign policy issue could be reached, the survey indicated considerable skepticism about whether it would work: 66% do not believe the Soviets can be trusted to keep their end of the bargain, and a surprising 28% think the U.S. is similarly unlikely to honor the fine print of a pact...