Communists: Among Friends

The East bloc meets in Sofia

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 a few weeks...

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