As the crisis deepens, the Soviets threaten to play the economic card
Day after day, the rhetoric grew shriller. TASS, the Soviet news agency, fired barrages against the Solidarity union federation, accusing its leaders of spreading "dirty and slanderous" anti-Soviet propaganda. As part of a well-orchestrated proletarian protest, workers at Moscow's Hammer and Sickle steel plant approved a letter denouncing Solidarity as a band of "counterrevolutionaries" and invoking the Warsaw Pact's duty to "defend socialism and its achievements from any encroachments." Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, in a speech before the...