Hungarian Paper Indirectly Assails Czech, E. German Hard-Line Stand

The government newspaper Monday implicitly criticized Warsaw Pact allies Czechoslovakia and East Germany in harsh terms for hampering East Bloc political reforms, a day after the Hungarian Communist Party announced approval of multi-party politics.

“In many countries of Eastern Europe there is a political, economic and moral crisis,” the official newspaper Magyar Nemzet said. “The reform factions of the Communist parties have drawn a conclusion that the way out from the crisis is only through the adoption of a division of power (with the opposition).”

“There is a country where a great writer is being harassed and where perestroika (reform) is flatly refused,” the report said in veiled reference to Vaclav Havel, a Czechoslovak author who has been jailed for his political activity.

The newspaper criticized another unnamed country where it said “the symbol of the division of Europe is upheld and where each menacing characteristic of hard dictatorship is to be found”--a clear reference to the Berlin Wall erected by East Germany during the early 1960s with Soviet approval.

“The question remains which direction the Soviet Union, the initiator of changes in Eastern Europe, will steer the community,” the paper said in reference to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms, launched in his country and encouraged in Soviet Bloc nations.

Hungarian Communist Party leader Karoly Grosz earlier announced that authorities have decided to permit opposition parties to operate, the latest step in a loosening the party’s monopoly of power.

Grosz did not indicate the extent to which the party would be willing to give up its monopoly on power. But Grosz said it will have to win popular support to govern.