Millions in E. Europe Silently Back Reagan

When President Reagan sits down with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev for the first time today, he will do so with the silent support of millions of East Europeans who fervently agree with the President’s conservative foreign policy and admire his tough stance toward the Soviets.

As much as anyone in the West, East Europeans hope that his meeting with the Soviet leader will bring an eventual relaxation of global tensions.

But many privately applaud Reagan’s anti-Communist rhetoric and believe that the U.S. military buildup under his Administration has done more than anything else to bring the Soviets to Geneva, both for the continuing arms control talks and for the summit.

“We think Reagan has the correct policy toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” said a Polish historian, expressing a widely held point of view in Eastern Europe.

‘Soviets Are Afraid’

“With the Soviets, you have to talk from a strong position. You’re seeing conciliatory (Soviet) gestures now because of America’s arms policy. The Soviets are afraid they’re losing the arms race,” the historian said.

Although no precise and independent measure of public opinion is available, Reagan is probably the most popular U.S. President among the 135 million people of Eastern Europe since the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union imposed its authority over most of the region.

Reagan’s popularity stands in striking contrast to the official propaganda of East Bloc governments, which paints him, in varying degrees of hostility, as the leading threat to world peace.

In Hungary, “he’s very popular among ordinary people,” an engineer in Budapest noted. “He’s standing up to the Russians as no one else is.”

The engineer, encountered by chance in a restaurant, volunteered that the Atlantic Alliance was right to place cruise and Pershing 2 missiles in Europe to balance the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 missiles. But, he added gloomily: “I’m afraid it’s too late for the West. The Russians are too strong.”

In Romania, where people are more cautious about airing personal political views, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest report receiving a steady flow of small gifts for the President, mostly simple handicrafts.

Popularity Highest in Poland

Reagan’s popularity is unquestionably highest in Poland, where opinions tend to be colored by family ties to emigre communities in the United States, and by centuries-old hostility toward the Soviets.

Prayers were offered in some churches last year for Reagan’s reelection. When he won by a landslide, the U.S. Embassy was deluged with congratulatory cards, telephone calls and flowers. Solidarity demonstrators sometimes break into chants of “Long Live Ronald Reagan,” and some deeply committed anti-Communists keep his picture in their apartments as an icon of freedom.

After the independent Solidarity trade union was suppressed under martial law in 1981, many Poles approved of the economic sanctions the Reagan Administration imposed in retaliation, in the belief that they served as a moderating force on Wojciech Jaruzelski’s military regime.

In recent months, however, this aspect of the President’s popularity has begun to wane. Many Poles--including Solidarity leader Lech Walesa--have come around to the view that the remaining sanctions are doing more harm to the economy than good to the body politic.

“People are more realistic and less emotional these days. They’ve begun to see a connection between the American sanctions and their standard of living,” said a Polish journalist with Solidarity sympathies. “For this reasons, attitudes toward Reagan are changing in some respects.”

Robust Underground Press

Polish officials insist that their public opinion surveys show that Reagan’s admirers make up an insignificant minority of anti-Communist fanatics, but the robust underground press contends otherwise.

“What’s the difference between the United States and Poland?” asks a riddle circulated by the Solidarity underground.

“In the United States,” goes the answer, “some people are against Reagan.”

Actually, notes a law student at Warsaw University, a hotbed of anti-Communist thinking, “there are two groups of opinion on Reagan.”

“There are those who depend on the state for everything. Pensioners, for instance, who get all their information from television. They believe what they hear, and they really hate Reagan. But among others he enjoys a lot of popularity.”

While it may have been an oversimplification for Reagan to brand the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the student observed, it could not be said that the President was mistaken. Two companions smiled in agreement.

Americans ‘Like Simplicity’

“This was for American public opinion. Americans don’t like too many details,” a second law student said. “They like simplicity.”

A middle-aged professor, approached at random on the university campus, was one of several who credited the U.S. arms buildup for bringing the Soviets to Geneva. No one in an hourlong series of interviews in the center of Warsaw volunteered a negative view of Reagan, or a positive one of Gorbachev.

“Reagan is your first postwar President who has reawakened American patriotism,” said the professor, who, along with all others questioned insisted on anonymity. Shaking his fist for emphasis, he said: “His policy toward Moscow is the right one. . . . If Reagan were President in 1945, Poland would be free today.”

His remark reflected a widely held belief in Poland that the British and Americans, especially President Franklin D. Roosevelt, failed to exert all the force they might have at the Yalta Conference with Stalin in 1945 to ensure Poland’s independence, and thus sold out Poland to maintain harmony with Moscow. The Soviet Union has subsequently interpreted the Yalta agreement as having ratified its domination of Eastern Europe.

Most of those questioned voiced only modest expectations for the Geneva summit. Their hopes centered on the possibility of gradually reduced East-West tensions that would lead to easier travel to the West and increased cultural exchanges and trade. No one expects Eastern Europe to be high on the agenda, but there are hopes that it will at least be touched upon.