Document
7.
President Eisenhower was worried that because of their failures
in Eastern Europe the Soviets might take "any wild adventure." At the meeting
of the National Security Council on 31 October 1956, he expressed his concern
that "Soviet suspicions of U.S. policy and present circumstances which
involve Soviet troop movements and alerts probably increase the likelihood
of a series of actions and counter-actions leading inadvertently to war."
This statement is included in the document entitled "U.S. Policy toward
Developments in Poland and Hungary," NSC-5616, a "sanitized" version with
deletions was published in Foreign Relations of the United States,
1955-57, vol. 25, pp. 463-69; its full version is available at the National
Security Archive, RN 66037.
Document
8.
Contrary to the President's fears, the Soviet leaders concluded
on the same day that "there will be no large-scale war." Informal notes
of the Soviet party presidium deliberations, during which they reversed
themselves several times before deciding to intervene by force, were kept
by Vladimir Malin, head of the general department of the party central
committee. They have been preserved in the Storage Center for Contemporary
Documentation in Moscow and published in the Cold War International
History Project Bulletin, nos. 8-9 (1996/97), pp. 388-410, by Mark
Kramer. The most important of the notes follow.
The key documents on Soviet decision-making during the 1968
Czechoslovak crisis were published by the National Security Archive in
the book, The
Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998)
Document
9.
In 1994, minutes of the Soviet party presidium meetings showing
its reluctance to intervene militarily in the Polish crisis were published
in Moscow ("Dokumenty `Komissii Suslova': Sobytiia v Polshe v 1981 g."
[Documents of the "Suslov Commission": The Events in Poland in 1981], Novaia
i Noveishaia Istoriia, 1994, no. 1: 84-105). At the time of the publication,
the public debate about the admission of Poland into NATO was gaining momentum,
and it has been suggested that that by releasing evidence to the effect
that in 1981 the Soviet Union had not been a military threat to Poland,
the Russian government wanted to bolster its argument that Polish membership
in the Western alliance was unnecessary. Nevertheless, no doubts have been
cast on the authenticity of the documents, including the record of the
presidium meeting on 10 December 1981, three days before the Polish government
declared martial law.
Document
10.
Under the new party leadership of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish
general staff in November 1956 established a special commission, headed
by Gen. Jan Drzewiecki, to press for a renegotiation of the Warsaw Pact.
Invoking the status of American forces in foreign countries as an example,
the commission proceeded with its work despite Soviet military intervention
in Hungary and submitted its proposal for the reform of the alliance to
the Soviet Union in January 1957. The proposal was promptly rejected.