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134 Document No. 18: Letter from Erich Honecker to Leonid Brezhnev November 26, 1980 For weeks, East German concern had been building that events in Poland could spill across their shared border unless extreme action was taken to stem the crisis. In late November, SED leader Erich Honecker made the case to Brezhnev for an urgent meeting of Warsaw Pact party leaders to confront Poland’s Stanisław Kania. Honecker was already on record saying to Kania’s hard-line colleague, Stefan Olszowski , that bloodshed, while a last resort, was sometimes called for. In this letter to Brezhnev, Honecker pleads that to delay would mean the death of socialist Poland. The Soviet leader accedes to the entreaty and a momentous meeting eventually takes place on December 5 (see Document No. 22). Esteemed Comrade Leonid Ilyich! The Central Committee of the SED has discussed the current situation in Poland, and we have come to the unanimous conclusion that there is an urgent need for a meeting of the general secretaries and the first secretaries of the communist parties of our community of states. We believe that we should discuss the emerging situation in the People’s Republic of Poland in order to work out collective emergency measures to assist our Polish friends in overcoming the crisis that, as you know, is escalating day after day. Unfortunately, it already can be said that the visit of the Polish comrades to Moscow and the timely good advice to them has not had any decisive influence on the situation in Poland, which we all had been counting on. According to information we have received from various channels, counterrevolutionary forces in the People’s Republic of Poland are on the constant offensive ,11 and every delay is equivalent to death—the death of socialist Poland. Yesterday, our joint measures would have possibly been premature; today they are essential; tomorrow they could already be too late. It would be advisable that we meet in Moscow for a day right after the Conference of the CC PVAP, whose decisions we believe will not significantly change the development of events in Poland. 11 Among the events in this period that would have provoked Honecker’s consternation was the so-called Narożniak affair, in which a volunteer in the Mazowsze branch of Solidarity, Jan Narożniak, was arrested on November 21 after the discovery in his apartment of a secret document from the general prosecutor’s office calling for the fabrication of evidence against Solidarity. The Mazowsze branch demanded wide-ranging investigations into the general prosecutor’s office that went beyond the August agreements , and threatened large-scale protests unless the authorities released Narożniak and the government employee who had leaked him the document. 135 As far as I know, Comrades Husák and Zhivkov have also expressed the desire that we urgently meet to discuss this issue. It would be best to do that next week. We believe that collective advice and possible assistance from Comrade Kania’s allies can only help. We ask you, esteemed Leonid Ilyich, to understand our extraordinary concern about the situation in Poland. We know that you also share these concerns. With communist greetings, E. Honecker general Secretary of the SED CC [Source: SAPMO-Barch ZPA, J IV 2/2-1868, B. 5–6. First published in Michael Kubina and Manfred Wilke, “Hart und kompromißlos durchgreifen:” Die SED contra Polen 1980/81: geheimakten der SED-Führung über die Unterdrückung der polnischen Demokratiebewegung. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), pp. 122– 123. Translated by Catherine Nielsen for the National Security Archive.] ...

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