Perestroika Gets Mixed Reviews in East Europe

If you live in East Berlin, Prague or Bucharest, chances are that you will find it virtually impossible to buy a copy of Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party and once a staple, while in the local East German, Czech, Slovak and Romanian newspapers you will find precious little about the words and deeds of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. If, on the other hand, you live in Warsaw, you can now watch Soviet television to your heart’s content on your home TV set, via satellite, and you really do not need Pravda to keep up on Moscow news because the Polish press is full of it.

This domestic ideological-political censorship in one instance and “openness” in the other powerfully symbolize today’s conflicting sentiments and responses of the five East European communist regimes to the campaign of perestroika (reconstruction) that Gorbachev launched in the Soviet Union 2 1/2 years ago to modernize and--presumably--to rescue the Marxist-Leninist system from ultimate decomposition. It is a fundamentally important phenomenon in the postwar history of the Muscovite empire, reflecting its growing inner crises and struggles.

Thus the East Germans and the Czechoslovak rulers despise the whole idea of Gorbachev’s sweeping reforms, though paying it minimal lip service; Romania does not even go through the motions. Conversely, Gorbachev’s best friend in the Socialist reform movement is Poland’s Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Hungarians, who have been quietly experimenting with economic reform for 20 years--but who nowadays face new basic problems at home--wish the new Soviet ruler well. The Bulgarians, as usual, faithfully follow Moscow’s example.

And the tale of communist reform movements is equally fascinating in Asia: Economic reform has been successfully under way for nine years in China, long the Kremlin’s rival, and in the last year it has begun to take root in Vietnam.

Finally, reformist Poland has become reformist China’s formal gateway into Eastern Europe, following the June visit to Warsaw by Premier Zhao Ziyang; Zhao then went to other Eastern Europe capitals. Jaruzelski was in Beijing last autumn, and it is no secret that the new Polish-Chinese friendship is expected to form a bridge for China’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union, now that both nations converge on the reform path.

By any standards, it would be a vast understatement to say that all these responses to Gorbachev’s perestroika constitute historical ironies: They do, and few would have believed them possible after the violent liquidation of Solidarity in Poland just 5 1/2 years ago--to say nothing of the rampaging Soviet tanks in East Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But such are the winds of contemporary political change.

The Polish irony is, of course, the most evident. In December, 1981, acting under immense pressure from Leonid I. Brezhnev, then the top Soviet leader, Jaruzelski in his capacity as premier and first secretary of the Polish Communist Party declared martial law and smashed the Solidarity movement; a Soviet invasion was the alternative.

Five years later, however, not only many of Solidarity’s basic reform concepts--such as a rational restructuring of the long-crippled Polish economy and considerable openness in public life and discussion--are accepted features of the Jaruzelski government, but the Soviet regime under Gorbachev supports them totally. What could not be preserved from Solidarity days were truly independent trade unions--though Poland has the greatest degree of de facto political pluralism in the communist world.

The existence of the new Polish experiment, this time supposedly conducted under Communist Party aegis, and its support by Gorbachev stem from a series of realities. One is that Jaruselski could not smash the spirit of Solidarity in the Polish society and he has behaved accordingly through policies that last year culminated in amnesty for all Solidarity-type political prisoners. The other central reality is Gorbachev’s assumption of power, his decision to try to reform the inefficient Soviet system, and his consequent understanding of why Jaruselski has to refashion the Polish communist state.

Consequently, Gorbachev and Jaruselski became mutually supportive politically, personally close and ideologically allied within the world communist bloc in terms of the need for fundamental change. This is why Poles can now watch Soviet television to see how perestroika seems to be doing along with glasnost-- the concept of openness--and why top officials on both sides consult about respective domestic problems.

Gorbachev and Jaruselski both face tremendous opposition at home from orthodox factions in the entrenched communist bureaucracies and what the Poles call communist apparatchik “privilegentsia,” the corrupt officialdom during changes and purges. And they both are resented and fought in at least three other communist capitals.

One is Prague, and Czechoslovakia is the other irony in the context of communist reform movements. For decades a Stalinist bastion, that country exploded in 1968 in the joy of the “Prague spring,” the experiment in “Marxism With a Human Face” led by Communist Party liberals. It was ended eight months later by the Soviet invasion, and replaced by the repressive regime headed by Soviet-picked President Gustav Husak, now in its 19th year in power. Today, Husak seems unable to comprehend why the Soviets under Gorbachev are pushing for many of the same reforms they smashed militarily in 1968.

Though Czechoslovakia has prospered economically in relative terms under Husak (it is a prewar industrialized state), its growth rate is dropping alarmingly and is falling far behind in new technology. A total ban on political dissent and a sense of hopelessness about the future probably has much to do with this decline, but Husak and his associates reject the notion of fundamental changes.

After Gorbachev visited Prague in April, Husak made polite noises about reforms. He produced his own supposedly reformist policy called przestawba (reshuffle), but his top officials hasten to say, “it all takes time.”

In East Germany, the communist leader Erich Honecker, 16 years in power, has only contempt for Gorbachev’s reformism. Last February, the East German Communist Party’s official newspaper Neues Deutschland heavily censored the text of Gorbachev’s crucial speech before the Soviet party’s Central Committee, and the promised publication of a German-language text in book form was canceled. When Gorbachev came to East Berlin in May for a communist summit meeting, the official word was that Soviet-type reforms are “not necessary” in East Germany. The following month the riot police fought for three successive nights crowds of youngsters demonstrating near the Berlin Wall.

In Romania, once acclaimed in the West for its foreign-policy independence from Moscow, Gorbachev is truly hated. President Nicolae Ceausescu has turned his nation into one of the world’s worst police states and into an economic basket case after his 22 years in power while implementing a personality cult for the Ceausescu family that would make Stalin blush. He abhors anything that smacks of perestroika and glasnost, and when Gorbachev visited Bucharest in May, the Rumanians kept his speech off their television network.

Ceausescu claims that it is a matter of Romanian sovereignty to reject outside influences--meaning Soviet reform pressures--while Gorbachev said in Bucharest that “even if you tell me that everything is all right in the country, I wouldn’t believe you.”

Gorbachev’s “new thinking” includes the tenet that Moscow is no longer the world’s communist “center,” and that each party must tailor its own policies. But he also realizes that the inadequate (and often disastrous) conditions of Eastern European economies are undermining the Comecon, the communist common market that is vital for the Soviet economy, and that hard-line leaders in Eastern Europe are natural allies of Soviet domestic foes of his reforms, with a considerable sabotage potential.

In the end, then, what Gorbachev faces is a basic generational problem. Himself a man in his middle 50s, he is pitted against the old men of European communism in power for a generation or more. Honecker is 75 years old, Husak 74 and Ceausescu 69. In Hungary, Janos Kadar is 75 (and in power for 31 years), and in Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov is 76 (33 years in power). In Poland, Jaruselski is 64, but intellectually he belongs to Gorbachev’s modern communist world.

Throughout Eastern Europe, this generational pattern is largely reflected in the communist Establishment, and Gorbachev’s true battle is to keep the old men from derailing the future. Often silent and invisible, it is a battle of historical proportions four decades after the Soviet Union gave liberated Eastern Europe the awesome gift of Marxism-Leninism.