Iron Curtain Cranks Up on Stages of Disarray

A specter haunts Eastern Europe, not the communism Karl Marx saw stalking the Continent in the 19th Century, but the spirit of freedom clanking its chains and scaring the daylights out of a communist elite so long in power.

On Nov. 7, the 71st anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the same day tens of thousands of Muscovites followed the military parade through Red Square, 100,000 Hungarians invaded Austria. They came in automobiles and buses, stopping other traffic dead in its tracks. They were loaded with hard currency--remittances from friends and relatives abroad or money earned on working vacations in the West. These Hungarians, unlike those who have fled since 1956, were not seeking escape, only the freedom to buy electrical appliances, clothing or whatever else their hearts desired. For the first time since the communists seized power in 1947, the border with Austria was opened. The mine fields, electrified fences and watch towers with pointed machine guns are gone. Hungarians and Austrians no longer even need visas to cross their common border. All in all, they document a sharp turn in Hungary’s affairs, to freedom of expression and of choice in politics and economics as well. The invaders all went home. Theirs is a trend the communist leadership is running to keep up with, one eye on Moscow and the 60,000 Soviet troops still stationed in Hungary.

Other events in the region raise questions about control. Will it be the party rather than the state that withers away? What does seem sure is that communist leaders are trying to ride historic change as they have ridden out other crises. It is hard to see how they can succeed.

All things being equal, the communist upper class likes things as they have been. There is great comfort in the institutionalization of privilege that keeps both the ins and the outs in their place. Jobs are held out of loyalty rather than merit. Competition or reform is unsettling. Today, however, all things are not equal. The leadership is literally being driven to change. Gorbachev recognizes, as Lenin did when he launched the New Economic Policy in 1921, that individual initiative must be set free.

While Josef Stalin’s monstrous rule is now being laid bare in detail, there is no criticism of Lenin, who initiated some of the worst features of the Soviet regime. Mikhail S. Gorbachev needs V. I. Lenin for perestroika , as a way to reassure bureaucratic interests that he respects the system’s roots and accepts a patron saint above reproach.

Three enormous placards dominated Red Square on Nov. 7. A portrait of Lenin in the center, flanked by his 1917 call for revolution--all power to the soviets, the land to the peasants, the factories to the workers--and flanked by Gorbachev’s call for revolution today, perestroika . Holiday Moscow used to be festooned with images of the Politburo; this year, there were no other posted pictures--not Marx or Engels--only Lenin.

If intellectuals are delighted with glasnost , many citizens are upset to learn how yesterday’s rulers victimized them in the name of progress or patriotism. They may wonder what historians will say about today’s leaders. In any case, you cannot eat glasnost. After 3 1/2 years of perestroika , Moscow was drab, even for November. Food and clothing were poor, prices high. Many people saw things getting worse, not better. One academician expressed his fear that patience is running out in this very patient country. People want results now , he said; they are tired of waiting.

There is no dodging the fact that perestroika means hardship. It means disentangling the incredibly thick network of the State Plan that has for generations assigned production quotas in every industry, set prices that bear no relation to supply and demand, provided factories with machinery and raw materials and moved their output. This monument of inefficiency is now crumbling.

Last March, Gorbachev visited Yugoslavia. He may, among other things, have wanted to see where decentralization leads. If so, he would have been shocked. After Marshal Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia pursued its own form of communism. Industry is based on “workers’ self-management” in factories. In the absence of competent managers with appropriate authority, this has degenerated into a crazy quilt of parochial anarchy, self-indulgence and corruption. Workers’ councils have distributed investment funds as pay raises to meet inflation, now approaching 250%. It is practically impossible to fire a worker, and with an unemployment rate of 15%, plant closings would bring social uproar. The predominantly private, if backward, agricultural sector keeps the country fed but the standard of living has sunk to the level of the 1960s. Enormous foreign debt keeps money tight.

Yugoslavia, the size of Wyoming, is composed of six republics and two districts. Ethnically and economically diverse, ranging from prosperous to poverty-stricken, each entity is fully autonomous. The central government in Belgrade has not much more power than the American Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. Tito, a Croat, wanted it that way, to prevent the largest republic, Serbia, from dominating the others. Until he died in 1980, he was the unquestioned boss. Since then, the presidency has revolved, one year at a time, among a panel of leaders from the eight autonomous entities. It is a pattern of total confusion, more unstructured than restructured.

In theory, the Yugoslav Communist Party unites the country. In fact, it too is broken up among the republics. And criticism of the party is growing. The officially owned, once-docile press has boldly exposed cancerous corruption--party privilege turned into cash and comfort in a time of hardship. In Bosnia, the largest newspaper printed a panoramic photograph of party fat cats’ vacation villas on the Adriatic Coast, with a page from the local phone book listing them all by name.

Party perquisites are now being cut back. Party membership has shrunk 10% in the past year as fewer young people join. Like the Soviet Communist Party, it is withdrawing from control of day-to-day affairs. We asked a member of the Central Committee whether it was not becoming irrelevant. His reply was one we later heard in Moscow as well--that the Central Committee would remain the “policy vanguard.” He did not say how.

Yugoslavs enjoy much more civil liberty than Soviet people. Their problems are opposites. Where Gorbachev wants to keep central control, adding benefits of decentralization, Yugoslavs want the discipline of a central authority to bring them together.

The forces of freedom being unleashed hold two dangers for the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Hungary and the rest of communist Eastern Europe. One is political upheaval; the other is the emergence of a strong hand to stifle it.