Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

The Soviet people's food supply project needed pilot programs, and Bulgaria faced less resistance to reform. Why not try it out in the special economic zone as well?

Zhivkov accepted the order with fervor—it was exactly what he wanted, giving him a tremendous opportunity to be "more Soviet than the Soviet Union"!

As soon as Zhivkov agreed to Slava's request, he began arranging for people to actually do the work.

Zhivkov himself was an empty shell; the key lay in the underlying layer. Slava used this meeting to bring Bulgarian Foreign Minister Mladenov, who had always maintained good relations with Moscow, and Lukanov, a technocrat with a keen understanding of economics, into Bulgaria's expanded Politburo, specifically to oversee the implementation of economic reforms.

Slava then took action to stop a buried mine.

Since 1984, Bulgaria has been carrying out a campaign called the "Renaissance Process," which aims to forcibly assimilate the approximately 800,000 ethnic Turkish Muslims who make up nearly 10% of the total population—forcing them to adopt Slavic names, banning the speaking of Turkish, and prohibiting Muslim religious activities.

By November 1987, the movement had become too difficult to stop. The names had all been changed, and the Turks were harboring resentment. Underground resistance organizations began to quietly take shape.

Slava knew very well that, according to another timeline, in just over a year, this pot would burn completely open—350,000 Turks would be driven across the border to Turkey in droves, causing one of the largest refugee crises in Europe since the war, and this refugee crisis was one of the direct triggers for Zhivkov's downfall!

Slava couldn't allow Zhivkov to publicly admit his mistakes, as that would split the Bulgarian Communist Party in two. However, he secretly drew a red line for Sofia:

What has already happened will not be pursued further. This movement ends here and must not be allowed to escalate any further!

No large-scale expulsions were allowed, and no new forms of forced assimilation were permitted. The reasons given to Zhivkov were also quite plausible: if the ethnic issue continued to escalate, it would damage the Soviet Union's image among Muslim countries in the Third World—after the Sino-Soviet reconciliation, the Soviet Union's relationship with the entire Islamic world was a crucial asset for Slava.

This move both defused a bomb that would later become a major obstacle for Bulgaria and gave the moderates within the Communist Party of Bulgaria, who already had reservations about the "revival process," some room to maneuver.

Finally, Slava gave Zhivkov what he wanted most: dignity and historical status.

At the meeting and in subsequent propaganda, Bulgaria was repeatedly portrayed as a "model of successful Warsaw Pact reforms"—how a relatively backward agricultural country transformed itself into a model student of computerized planned economy under the guidance of the Soviet model.

Zhivkov was seventy-six years old. He was a Communist Party member, had no religious beliefs, and did not believe in the idea of ​​going to heaven or hell after death. All he wanted in this life was a glorious exit and a place in history books.

Slava promised him these two things in exchange for him obediently changing the course while in office.

Both sides are happy.

"Ha, this old man," Director Nian commented afterwards, cracking sunflower seeds, half amused and half helpless.

"Others resist changing, but he's afraid of not changing fast enough, so he's always chasing after you to show his loyalty. This kind of compliance makes people feel a little uneasy."

Slava smiled but didn't reply. Bulgaria didn't need any grand, dramatic events; it only needed to prove that the Soviet model could truly be exported, could succeed, and could transform a poor country into a rich one.

This success story will become increasingly significant in the future.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

Then there's Romania, which is the biggest headache for Slava.

The General Secretary sitting in that magnificent palace in Bucharest—Ceaușescu—was not a leader with whom you could reason or make deals.

He lived within an impenetrable wall he had built himself.

Starting in 1981, Ceaușescu made a fanatical, almost obsessive determination to pay off all of Romania's $10 billion in foreign debt to the West in the shortest possible time.

The way to pay off the debt is to extract all the country's exportable goods in exchange for foreign exchange: food, fuel, electricity, nothing left!

But what about the people?

Strict rationing began in the city in 1981: one kilogram of meat, one kilogram of sugar, one liter of cooking oil, and one kilogram of flour per month... This was the most severe food rationing in all of Europe during peacetime!

Ceaușescu even personally organized something called the "Rational Diet Plan," declaring with a stern face that Romanians were eating too much and that the daily calorie intake of the nation should be scientifically and systematically reduced.

He described the Romanian famine as a time of plenty in Romania.

Since 1985, Romania has only provided electricity to civilians for a few hours a day, and the maximum temperature for heating in winter is capped at 14 degrees Celsius. However, the actual temperature in many apartments is only 8 or 10 degrees Celsius, making it too cold for people to sleep.

Hot water was only available a few days a week, and television and radio broadcasts were limited to two or three hours a day. That winter, the power outage even reached the hospital—dozens of newborn babies in incubators froze to death because of the power outage.

There's also Decree No. 770, which was issued in 1966.

In order to build up his population for his rapid industrialization, Ceaușescu issued a decree banning abortion and all forms of contraception.

Women of childbearing age were forced to undergo gynecological examinations every month, and even the secret police kept an eye on hospital maternity beds. What did this decree lead to? It led to the highest maternal mortality rate in Europe—over two decades, thousands of women died in pools of blood from clandestine abortions performed using the most primitive methods.

This policy forced the creation of state-run orphanages one after another—the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of children were not orphans at all, but were abandoned by parents who simply could not afford to raise them, or were born with disabilities. They suffered hunger and abuse in those filthy, powerless, and medicineless orphanages.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, a large number of Romanian children mysteriously disappeared or were transported abroad. Even now, many of the children featured on dark web video sites involving child pornography are Romanian.

P.S.: I'm not kidding. I tried setting up a network bridge on my phone before, back when network management wasn't so strict. I used my usual TOR network with a special browser to bypass it, and it made me sick. I've only ever seen that stuff once in my life, and I deleted the browser and network bridge before I even finished watching it. For a long time afterward, I felt disgusted whenever I saw anime lolis, and even now I have a strong aversion to anime grotesque characters. Anyone with even a shred of conscience would feel a physical revulsion upon seeing those videos.

At this time, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, who held the title of "Doctor of Chemistry" but had not even finished primary school, were living in the world's second largest administrative building after the Pentagon, built on land cleared by demolishing one-sixth of Bucharest's old town and destroying dozens of ancient churches and monasteries. They proclaimed themselves "the genius of the Carpathians" and "the wise man of the Danube," dreaming their own Nicholas I.

He also had an 80,000-strong secret police force, the "Ministry of State Security," independent of the army, which acted like an impenetrable net over this impoverished and silent country.

By 1987, Ceaușescu had largely paid off the debt. However, the cost was that it brought the country's overall standard of living back to the 1950s.

When Slava closed the report, all the hesitation in his heart completely disappeared.

Romania is fundamentally different from other countries. Kádár could gracefully step down, Honecker could be sidelined, and Kim Il-sung could be gradually integrated into the regional system—none of Ceaușescu's methods worked.

Because he himself was the root of the problem. You can't keep Ceaușescu around while simultaneously reforming his dynastic regime—Elena's power network, his son Nicu's faction, and that special secret police...

These things won't budge an inch as long as he's still sitting in that position!

Moreover, in Slava's timeline, Ceaușescu's situation represents a complete ideological bankruptcy. The entire legitimacy of his decades-long path to independence was built on the cornerstone that "the Soviet Union was wrong, and following the Soviet Union was wrong."

He was nominally in the Warsaw Pact, but in reality, the Soviet army could not get in at all. He held an anti-Soviet attitude on any major issue. Romania also received support from many Western countries and the United States—because the CIA believed that supporting this most unruly country in the Soviet bloc could shake the Soviet Union's influence.

But now that the Soviet Union is rich and strong, and its people are living better and better lives, how can Romania's independence theory still make sense? The foreign debt that he just paid off was originally his proudest political capital, but when placed next to the success of the Soviet Union, Romania's abject poverty seems particularly glaring and absurd.

Slava made up his mind: Ceausescu must be replaced!

Moreover, he did not intend to drag things out until the end of 1989, when a coup would break out in Romania, as was the case in history. At that time, the red flag would fall, and the Ceaușescu couple would be executed in front of the palace. They were dead, but Slava still needed the red flag of Romania.

He decided to overthrow the Ceausescu regime in 1988.

During the conference, Slava was outwardly polite to the delegation sent by Ceaușescu, but inwardly cold. He did not endorse Ceaușescu on any occasion, nor did he engage with his rhetoric on independence, leaving the stubborn old man truly feeling isolated among the fraternal parties gathered in Moscow.

He also tacitly approved the Hungarian delegation's formal proposal at the meeting to "concern the situation of the Hungarian compatriots in Transylvania"—a bomb dropped into the Warsaw Pact, bringing the issue of ethnic oppression in a member state to the forefront of the camp for the first time.

Ceaușescu was furious, but he couldn't refute a single word of their argument—because the Hungarians were waving the most righteous banner of "socialist internationalism."

The real important thing is to live in Bucharest.

Slava secretly contacted some cadres of the KGB and the Romanian Communist Party. Within the Romanian Communist Party, there was a group of veterans who had been suppressed and sidelined by Ceaușescu for many years.

There is Iliescu, who was marginalized in 1971 for opposing the "July Theses" and is now the president of a technical publishing house. He had many old acquaintances with the Soviet high command when he studied in Moscow in the 1950s.

There is Brukan, who has served as ambassador to the United States and is the most thoughtful critic in the party, but this person should be used with caution. Slava probably thinks he is another Yakovlev.

There's also General Militaru, who was dismissed in 1978 on suspicion of having ties to Soviet intelligence.

Through its old connections with Militaru and through Brukan's channels with the Soviet academic community, the KGB gradually connected these neglected individuals.

Slava's instructions to KGB Chairman Kryuchkov were clear: now is not the time to take action; what needs to be done now is to establish a contingency plan for the "post-Ceausescu era," so that the veteran opposition figures within the Romanian Communist Party clearly understand that Moscow will stand on their side.

At the same time, the Soviet Union also quietly increased its economic leverage.

Romania has virtually no foreign exchange reserves, lacks credit from the West, and its domestic production capacity is outdated and unusable because all of its investments in recent years have been used for exports to pay off debts.

Its own Ploiești oil field production is declining, while its dependence on Soviet oil and gas is increasing year by year.

Slava didn't cut off the pipe; he just quietly tightened it a little, which will cause Romania's economy to collapse even faster.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union secretly leaked information to the pragmatic faction within the Romanian Communist Party that it was willing to help Romania rebuild its consumer goods industry and provide consumer goods aid—provided that the political line was adjusted.

Ceaușescu himself would never accept the position, but the pragmatists within the party who had been suppressed by him for years and watched the country rot away would see a new way out.

So what if it was a coup? Didn't Ivanov come to power through a coup? Couldn't the Ceausescu couple have suddenly fallen ill, suffered a stroke, and announced their resignation?

All these seeds were quietly buried in the soil of Bucharest.

Once Ceausescu's economy is on the verge of collapse under the tightening reins, and once the anger of the people and the discontent within the party reach the same critical point, then a popular uprising and a coup within the party can occur simultaneously.

Iliescu would take over the country with the pragmatists in his party and establish a new pro-Soviet regime with access to computer programs.

This is the only Slavic regime that is determined to resolve the issue through bloodshed.

The regime's violent structure was built brick by brick by Ceausescu himself, and it cannot bow out peacefully.

“That paranoid maniac,” Director Nian said, gazing out the window at night, his usual cynical tone unusually absent. “If we had taken him down a year earlier, how many of those children in the orphanages, those babies in incubators, would have died less?”

Slava didn't speak, but stared at the Warsaw Pact map on the wall for a long time.

He knew better than anyone else in the world how that regime ultimately ended with the Christmas Day gunfire.

This time, he wants that day to come a year earlier.

Chapter 83 I Don't Want to Be a Warsaw Pact Member for the Rest of My Life

Many times, Slava would think that instead of forming an alliance, they should just let the Soviet Union take the lead and establish communism in one country first.

The predecessors left too many pitfalls and landmines for him. The implementation of the COMECON model in Eastern Europe did not achieve the expected results. It can be almost concluded that if things continued to develop in this way, the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe were inevitable.

After decades of development, the Eastern European countries have either stagnated, taken a big step toward the West, followed North Korea's example, or borrowed heavily and then left the problems to their descendants.

Now it's Slava's turn to clean up the mess.

In fact, he had other options, such as simply crushing all the rebels, traitors, and pro-Western liberals with tanks, sending a steel torrent straight to the Atlantic Ocean, and then rebuilding his edifice on the ruins.

However, for Slava, violence is always the last resort, whether it's war, special military operations, or special exercises, whatever it's called. For Slava, ending conflict with military violence is the ultimate means when political contradictions have reached a point of no return!

The social contradictions among the many smaller Eastern European countries were enormous, and none of them escaped being crushed by Soviet tanks. The Polish Solidarity trade union was suppressed, as were Czechoslovakia and Hungary. If the normal course of history had been followed, these communist regimes replicated by the Soviet Union should have ended long ago.

The Soviet Union simply kept them from collapsing by providing military support and economic subsidies.

Slava hopes to change this model, deepen the connections between countries, leverage the advantages of planned resource allocation, enable each country to have the capacity for both external support and internal development, and ultimately achieve the goals of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) – common progress and common prosperity.

However, the current Eastern European countries have different national conditions, and the logic of governing the Soviet Union cannot be applied to them. Some countries have not even completed agricultural collectivization, some countries have unbalanced industries, and some countries have basically abandoned the red flag except for the government buildings.

For example, Poland.

The Polish party has essentially lost its connection to society. It is the only country in the entire Warsaw Pact to openly admit that "the party cannot rule alone."

Sitting in that chair in Warsaw was Jaruzelsky, 64 years old, a general wearing sunglasses.

Those sunglasses weren't for showing off. When he was a child in 1939, his father, a Polish officer, was exiled by the Soviet Union, and he grew up in Siberia, which resulted in severe photophobia.

This was a man riddled with contradictions: at heart, he was a Polish nationalist with an inexplicable attachment to the Soviet Union that had exiled his family, yet strategically he was convinced of one thing—Poland had no choice but to follow the Soviet Union, because the other path led to Soviet tanks.

In December 1981, as Minister of Defense, he issued a martial law order, which crushed Solidarity, a trade union that had been established for just one year and had more than ten million members, into the ground. Keep in mind that Poland's total population was less than forty million!

The six years of continuous repression that followed were on his orders, yet he was also the one in the party who was most aware that "repression alone cannot sustain the party."

Economically, Poland was in a worse situation than Hungary. Its foreign debt was nearly $390 billion, the largest hole in the entire Warsaw Pact; inflation in 1987 soared to over 20%, and the black market exchange rate of the dollar to the zloty was five or six times higher than the official rate.

The Jaruzelsky government is pushing hard for the second phase of economic reforms, the core of which is large-scale price increases and subsidy cuts.

Many young people in later generations start complaining when inflation reaches 5%, unaware that their elders experienced inflation of over 20% in the 80s. Whether it was the neoliberal reforms in Britain, John D. Smith's dual-track pricing system, the planned market reforms of the Eastern Bloc, or the uncontrolled devaluation of the US dollar... everyone faced extremely severe inflation!

Therefore, in a sense, the economic crisis and political changes of the late 80s and 90s were inevitable, and everyone faced similar situations.

Just as the Slava meeting was being held, something unprecedented in the history of the Warsaw Pact was brewing in Warsaw—on November 29, just two weeks later, the Jaruzelski government was to hold a national referendum on economic reforms.

A regime that dares to voluntarily hand over its economic policies to the public for a vote! Just like Brexit, when the UK held a vote on Brexit, the top search terms on Google UK were "What is the EU?"

The public doesn't understand economic reforms or tax systems; they are simply dissatisfied with the status quo and want change. Their only consensus is that things can't continue like this!

As for how to change things and what direction is right, opinions vary widely, and this is when experts, scholars, and politicians take action.

Slava knew the outcome of the referendum: it would fail.

The Polish government raised two questions: one about economic reforms and the other about the vaguely worded "democratization." Of the 26 million eligible voters, only 44% voted in favor of the first question and 46% voted in favor of the second—but according to the government's own rules, it would only count if more than half of all eligible voters agreed.

With nearly a third of voters expressing their contempt by refusing to vote, this will be the first time the Polish system has stumbled in a vote it itself organizes.

A party that can't even win a referendum it organizes—that's the true nature of Poland.

Poland also has something that no other Warsaw Pact country has – a massive, organized opposition with a legitimate history and international moral authority.

Although Solidarity went underground, its underground printing network, its support system within the church, and the transnational support network it wove through the Polish Pope John Paul II still exist.

And Lech Wałęsa, the former leader of the Solidarity trade union, still holds the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even more problematic is the church. With 93% of Poles being Catholic, in vast rural areas the church is practically a substitute social authority, making it virtually impossible for the Party to penetrate its influence!

Just five months earlier, in June, the Pope returned to Poland for the third time, drawing millions of people wherever he went—he also publicly met with Lech Wałęsa.

This trip instilled a surge of spiritual energy into the entire Polish opposition.

Unlike the Soviet Union or the Old Zhong, which had a large atheist community, Poland had only a small number of atheists, and the vast majority of these people were Communist Party members.

Koslava had a clear understanding of how to handle the Polish question:

Jaruzelsky was the most useful leader to him in the Eastern Bloc.

Other leaders resisted change to varying degrees: Honecker resisted, Ceaușescu was paranoid, Kádár was aging, Hussak was rigid, and Zhivkov was just copying others.

Jaruzelski, however, knew perfectly well that the Polish party was dead and needed to be given a new form to live on!

Yaruzelsky was already prepared to obey; the only question was what to obey.