Kremlin Sends Its Allies Mixed Signals on Reform

The Kremlin issued a mixed set of signals Wednesday to its East European partners, indicating that it accepts the need for diversity among them based on “national peculiarities” but warning that political and economic reforms must stay within ideological bounds defined by the Soviet Union.

The message came in a report by the official Tass news agency on two days of meetings between Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Hungary’s Communist Party chief, Janos Kadar.

Economic reforms that Kadar has instituted since the late 1960s have led Hungary further than any other Warsaw Pact nation toward a market-style economy--and away from the Soviet model, based on a rigid form of centralized planning devised under Josef Stalin.

This was Kadar’s first working visit to Moscow since Gorbachev assumed power in March, and it was expected to produce further hints of the new Soviet leader’s views on relations with Eastern Europe.

Short of Endorsement

In keeping with standard practice, there was no public indication of a divergence of views between Moscow and one of its nominal allies. Phrasing in the Tass report, however, fell far short of an endorsement for Hungary’s bold deviation from the Soviet model, despite the relative prosperity the Hungarians have achieved.

Tass said the two leaders agreed on the need to take “national peculiarities” into account as Communist-ruled nations developed, a term signaling Moscow’s recognition that some degree of diversity among East European countries is inevitable, given their great cultural and historical differences.

But the report stressed what it called the need to make “fuller use of the historical advantages of socialism and all possibilities inherent in socialist plan-based economic management” while “vigorously asserting” the social, ideological and cultural values of Marxism-Leninism.

Hungary has largely abandoned Soviet-style central planning, in which the government dictates detailed production requirements to farms and industry and allows little leeway for individual initiative on the part of managers.

Means of Pacification

Moscow is thought to have tolerated Hungary’s reforms partly as an interesting experiment and partly as a means of pacifying the nation of 10 million, where the Soviet invasion of 1956 crushed an anti-Communist uprising and, amid thousands of deaths, left a permanent residue of bitterness.

The Tass report also emphasized a need for closer economic cooperation between Hungary and the Soviet Union, especially in research and development. Moscow has recently signed a series of 15- to 20-year agreements with its Warsaw Pact trading partners that appears to be part of a broad new Soviet effort to bind East European economies more closely to its own.

Tass avoided comment on Hungary’s 17 years of economic reforms, which, since 1983, have allowed a blossoming of small private enterprises. This contrasted with a harshly worded article that appeared in the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda in June, condemning any weakening of central planning or other forms of state economic control in Eastern Europe.

‘Serious Consequences’

That article, widely discussed in Eastern Europe, declared that any move toward a market economy or a widening of the private sector is “fraught with serious economic, social and ideological consequences,” including “violations of social justice and a consequent increase of social tension.”

Tass said the meeting between Gorbachev and Kadar, a shrewd politician who enjoys a larger measure of popularity at home than any other Soviet Bloc leader, was warm and friendly and “showed a complete identity of views on all matters discussed.”