Changes in Eastern Europe and Their Impact on the USSR

This February 1989 report by the Bogomolov Commission analyzes the current situation in Eastern Europe for Alexander Yakovlev, key foreign policy advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev. The Bogomolov Commission was the largest Soviet think tank conducting research on the East European countries. This document can be compared with the memorandum by the International Department of the CC CPSU (document 134), also prepared for Yakovlev in early 1989. Both reports reflect many of the same concerns and view the developments in Eastern Europe as a crisis whose solution involves reshaping the framework of Soviet-East European relations from Soviet dominance/East European dependence to some form of cooperation amongst autonomous states. But the Bogomolov document displays a greater acceptance of the possibility that East European states will abandon socialism. One of the strategies that the report advocates is "Finlandization" as a potential model for this process, based upon the Finland-Soviet relationship, where Finland maintained domestic sovereignty but deferred to its superpower neighbor in foreign policy issues. Bogomolov analysts present this model as one way to transform Eastern Europe from a buffer zone for Soviet national security to a bridge linking the USSR with the West.