"Reagan realised that it was possible, even necessary, to collaborate on a friendly footing with the new Soviet leader who sincerely embraced a policy of openness. Indeed, he went so far as to magnanimously subscribe to the role in which Gorbachev sought to cast him before the Soviet leadership and, perhaps, the entire world: that of the uneducated, superficial demagogue. In other words, Gorbachev shone in the limelight even as his Soviet Union was fatally bursting at the seams with the centrifugal forces unleashed in the process."

"From the mid-1980s the leading diplomats of the Western powers maintain a day-to-day contact with the Hungarian opposition, as well as with the leading reformists of the Hungarian Communist Party. From 1988, the Hungarian opposition builds institutional contacts with Western European parties."