In fact the demonstrations and the subsequent arrests were being discussed at the highest level. A Politburo meeting took place on Tuesday 2 February 1988. The government felt more insecure than many western commentators assumed at the time, faced with a growing surge of street protests at home and growing uncertainty over whether, in the era of Glasnost, the authorities could still rely on fraternal military support from the Soviet Union of the kind employed the last time total breakdown had threatened, back in 1953 (or more recently, in Czechoslovakia, in 1968). Applying a strategy of damage limitation the Politburo decided to expel the imprisoned dissidents to the west. As presented to media by the government lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, this meant that all the detainees would be released, including those in the Stasi's special Hohenschönhausen jail facing treason charges, and each one could freely choose whether he or she wished to be released in the east or in the west.