Anatoly Chernyaev's Notes excerpts from the Politburo Session 8 May 1987 “On the Doctrine of the Warsaw Treaty Organization ” On the Doctrine of the Warsaw Treaty Organization Gromyko We have always had a defense doctrine in the political and the military sense Shevarnadze I am for publishing the truth about the number of our troops in central Europe… not for withdrawal but for the truth and arguments Yakovlev Supporting Shevarnadze We should say something about the disbalance Otherwise we will come not only to a propaganda dead end but a political one as well Gorbachev To Marshall Sokolov When you go into a place think about how you will go out… Sokolov Our the Warsaw pact organization military personnel is right now bigger than the NATO’s by 170 thousand Out of that 70 thousand are Soviet troops the rest are troops of the allies There is no disbalance And then how would we reduce them How do we keep what we’ve won Withdrawing troops would be a policy mistake Chebrikov The issue of disbalance deserves serious attention But we are taking into account the territory from the Atlantic to the Urals In that case there is no disbalance Dobrynin The essence of the issue is whether to say that we have more troops in the center of Europe than NATO has or not We need to close down Vienna somehow If we want to be honest we have to say that We were cunning for 13 years and we have to admit it now Medvedev There is a phrase in the doctrine “we will respond with all the means available ” Does this mean with nuclear weapons as well It is necessary for every formula to be precise not “on the whole ” Vienna will not be “taken down” if the sore point disbalance is not taken down We cannot leave untruths… We cannot ignore our own views And we need to speak openly about the territory of Europe being from the Atlantic to the Urals Zaikov It would be better to speak about disbalance in Mikhail Sergeevich’s speech Gorbachev They in the West know about it anyway… Zaikov They know but it is a different matter when you say it We need to acknowledge it openly The question of control arises next So far we have been trying to avoid control ourselves Gorbachev How the disbalances were formed—the skewed proportions on different types of weapons here arguments must be used as well Akhromeev I think that we should try to find a solution to the issue of the disbalance of armaments in Europe and we should state it openly Gorbachev Firstly I disagree that there is “nothing new” in the document Our understanding of the problems has deepened Policy is the main issue here The speculations are going on Remember I told you about my meeting with Thatcher She said they were afraid of us that we invaded Czechoslovakia Hungary and Afghanistan This perception is widespread among the public there It persists in the minds of many people Anti-Soviet propaganda is based on it We should strengthen our policy for humanization of international relations with our actions There were public statements by our generals in military journals for example marshal Grechko’s article They put the West on guard and strengthen their distrust That is why politically it makes sense for me to give a speech and publicly state the new doctrine Secondly What should the character of this doctrine be like We are not just sitting or lying on our military doctrine we are trying to find a way to make the world more stable Now even parity ceased to be a guarantee Therefore we propose to act in an appropriate fashion And we will not be stubborn about having 27 thousand tanks and almost 3 5 million soldiers there I would like to second Vadim Andreevich on the issue of implementing “all corresponding means” This is ambiguity We overlooked a very important question—the question of sufficiency Many scientists the public responded to this idea And we need to make a statement that we are striving to keep the armaments at the lowest level About disbalance I must say nobody in the Defense Council could explain clearly what strategic parity is This is not a question of statistics it is a question of military policy Strategic parity means that we have a reliable guarantee of defense of our country And the enemy will not attack us because in that case it would receive an unacceptable retaliatory strike If we anticipate such a result then we have parity But if we start counting—they have a rifle we have a rifle—then we should stop with the building of socialism They have 6 billion people working on armaments So should we try to catch up the number We should put an end to such an approach I ask the question we will keep turning the country into a military camp They clearly want to pull us into another round of the arms race They are counting on our military exhaustion And they will portray us as militarists And they are trying to pull us in on the SDI There are the positions from which we should formulate our military doctrine And when we speak about the number of our troops in Europe and if we state the numbers honestly then we would have to come to the decision to withdraw them at an appropriate time It is important for the leadership of our allies that we keep our military presence there And is not so important how many troops there are We also need the presence it is a political element—so that others know if they touch our allies they will have to deal with our power Somewhere here lies the fruit of long contemplation The direction of thought must be only such… We need to approach Eastern Europe from these positions We have defense there we have strong powers What is the difference whether there are 380 thousand there or 300 thousand What is important is the matter itself and the positioning of the troops Therefore the approach of one soldier there one soldier here they have a bullet we have a bullet—is not our approach We need to find a way out of Vienna The numbers are important here we need to make it clear Let us say we keep 170 thousand But there should be no rush—like we were going to withdraw the rest immediately We should tell the government heads about this at the PCC in the context of the Budapest initiative We must not allow it to look like retreat We need to think this trough discuss it with our allies and then propose to the West during negotiations Let them react Maybe they will tell us that we do not need to do it It is important for us to untie the line of trust trust and trust once again The West is speaking about it all the time and we are just cunning around And if we are talking about Europe as the territory between the Atlantic and the Urals then you the NATO members should go ahead and withdraw troops We will have to deal with their troop numbers Here they are afraid because they would have to ship the Americans over the ocean Translated by Svetlana Savranskaya and Anna Melyakova for the National Security Archive