East, West Europe Face New Roles

Conservative German publisher Axel Springer, a dedicated believer in the Cold War, built his 19-story, gold-anodized aluminum headquarters at the very edge of the Berlin Wall--a beacon of protest in the mid-1960s against Communist Eastern Europe.

From the editorial offices of Springer’s publishing interests, the barren scar that divides Eastern and Western Europe was visible to all and, although Springer died in 1980, his newspapers, magazines and books continued to emphasize the stern message: The West must keep up its guard; no quarter to the Soviets.

Today, however, the view from the Springer tower--just two blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, one of the most prominent symbols of the Cold War’s division of Europe--holds far more promise than ever before.

“The winds of change are blowing,” said 58-year-old senior editor Stefan Gensicke, gazing down at the high, whitewashed concrete wall, “and they are blowing from west to east. I think we are seeing out there a Communist empire coming to an end.”

‘Imperial Appetite Is Gone’

Gensicke, an affable, neatly dressed native Berliner who studied at Syracuse University, added:

“The Soviets know they are going to have to liquidate that empire. The Russian imperial appetite is gone. The Communist missionary spirit is gone. They realize it doesn’t work. The big question is whether Western Europe can take advantage of the opportunities that are developing before our eyes in Eastern Europe. We should be looking for ways to help liberalize those governments in the East where we can.”

Gensicke and other opinion makers are experiencing a world in flux, an established order turned upside down, where the rules that kept Europe divided for more than four decades have begun to unravel.

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, those who dedicated their lives to the ideological struggle have been forced to adjust.

In the West, even the toughest of Europe’s cold warriors seem convinced that a new age is dawning after witnessing televised scenes of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who arrives in West Germany for a visit Monday, being heckled in a new Soviet legislature; the astounding spectacle of a Polish Communist Party official conceding defeat after the first free elections in Eastern Europe in more than 40 years, and the results of Gorbachev’s personal vision of a reformed Soviet Union. But it is a dawn filled as much with uncertainty as with hope.

In the East, those who gave their best years to the Marxist-Leninist crusade face a far more bitter reality: The very core of their belief--a belief in the inevitable triumph of communism--is crumbling.

Thus, a personal soul-searching is unfolding within the true believers on both sides of Europe’s divide that, in its own way, is as deep as the sweep of political change crossing the continent.

In a Warsaw garden, the sunlight playing on his tanned face, Artur Starewicz, looking far younger than his 72 years, recalled that he was only 39 when appointed to the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party under the new leadership of Wladyslaw Gomulka.

Named head of the press bureau, one of Starewicz’s first assignments was to fire 300 journalists as a warning against writing critically about the Communist regime. In 1957, glasnost, as Gorbachev’s policy of political openness is known, was a long way off in Poland.

For the next 15 years Starewicz was a true believer, one who had dedicated much of his life and study to the precepts of Marxist-Leninist theory, armed with a conviction that the international Communist movement might one day sweep its obstacles aside and wash the world with prosperity and justice.

Now, 10 years into retirement, his old convictions have disintegrated, and what he sees “from the border between East and West Germany to the Yellow Sea is complete crisis.”

“Everything is in a state of change, very deep change,” he said, “and no one knows what the end will be. One thing is sure. The Communist idea--socialism not only in the Soviet style but also in any other so-called ‘real’ socialist country--has fallen apart.

‘System Cannot Work’

“Considered even from the Marxist point of view, you come to only one conclusion: that this system cannot work. . . . It has problems with the elementary needs of the population.”

He concluded: “The situation is different in different countries, but everywhere the signs of crisis are clear--and nobody can deny it. We are in a completely different historical, political and strategic situation.”

To Starewicz, as to many others, the old issues of the Cold War--the slow grind of East-West confrontation, of armies massed behind borders--have receded behind the looming question of how the socialist system will be overhauled, transformed or possibly abandoned altogether.

Thus, the new situation is fraught with uncertainty and danger. And with political opposition emerging in countries like Poland and Hungary, the old order sees the future in shades of darkness, while the youthful opposition looks toward brighter days.

For Poland, says Starewicz, “the future is not clear. It would be dangerous to believe that the Soviets would accept an anarchic situation in Poland. . . . It is very difficult to forecast the future, because it depends on the strategic thinking in Moscow.”

In Britain, Malcolm Mackintosh, a leading Sovietologist, has spent his career as a cold warrior analyzing Soviet strategy.

He first encountered Moscow-style communism nearly 45 years ago, when he swapped souvenirs and stories with Soviet soldiers in Bucharest, Romania. Months later, as a young army translator in Sofia, Bulgaria, he was on duty at the British military mission when he learned that the entire Bulgarian Parliament had been executed on orders of the new Communist authorities.

“I think it was 103 in all,” Mackintosh, now 67 and retired, recalled in a recent interview. “For me, that was a kind of benchmark, a very powerful personal experience.”

Over the years, Mackintosh became a Russian specialist and as a British Cabinet adviser was a proponent of containment, the British nuclear deterrent and Western armed might.

Exploring the New Spirit

Although he argues that it is far too early for the West to lower its military guard, he is equally willing to explore the new spirit in the East Bloc and in Moscow.

“I’m totally against those who say, ‘Let’s make it more difficult for the Soviet Union by not helping them out, because they’ll eventually come around on their knees.’ The West should be ready to make maximum use of all the new spirit that’s coming out of Gorbachev’s administration,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for bringing them into areas where we can work together.”

“In principle,” he added, “there’s even something to be said for the idea of a Marshall Plan (the American program that spurred Western Europe’s economic recovery after World War II), but in practice it’s somewhat different. Because of the nature of the system, it will take so long to carry out Gorbachev’s economic reforms that however much money we shovel into the Soviet coffers, it would go down some endless well that might produce something in another 30-40 years.”

Whether the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies would accept aid under a Marshall Plan type program is an open question. They had spurned Marshall Plan assistance when it was offered by the Truman Administration in 1947. As an interpreter for British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden in his 1956 talks with Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, Mackintosh recalled that after hopes were raised, the Soviets sent tanks into Hungary to quell an uprising for freedom.

“We have to be careful before we rush into any military concessions simply because Gorbachev has promised something on his side,” he cautioned.

Still, Mackintosh views the changes as hopeful. And, in a sense, they have brought him back nearly full circle, once again trading comments in an amiable setting with Soviet military men.

In an event unthinkable just a few years ago, he met the Warsaw Pact’s commander Pyotr Lushev and two other senior Soviet generals recently in London--not as allies, as he met the Soviet soldiers in Bucharest, but also not as the secretive enemy of the Cold War era.

“It was a nice occasion,” Mackintosh said. “He (Lushev) even put himself out to crack a joke.”

But while the governments in the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary are undergoing profound change, those in other Warsaw Pact countries like Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia remain rigid.

Zdenek Horeni is the gray-haired, bespectacled 59-year-old editor of Rude Pravo, Czechoslovakia’s leading newspaper, which he edits from a cluttered fourth-floor office in Prague.

Sitting at the long table where his editors meet for conferences, he appeared to be a realist--which he indicated may be the only way to survive in the cautious, conservative world of Communist politics in Czechoslovakia.

Horeni maintains that he sees no crisis in the socialist system. Rather, he said, “in this country or that” there are “adjustments” going on according to local “conditions.”

In Czechoslovakia, as in East Germany, the old orthodoxies still are firmly in place, and Horeni declared he has “no reason to change anything in my ideas about social development or in the political tradition to which I have devoted my life.”

Thus, he believes that the new Europe will still develop along either side of a line--a line where the threat of military confrontation has been greatly reduced, if not eliminated, by a gradual reduction of armed might across the continent and the general atmosphere of relaxing tension. And, he says, “it is possible that this ‘common European’ house can stand--even with the existence of different political systems.”

Horeni sees Gorbachev as the initiator of these changes but credits former President Ronald Reagan for his “practical policies.”

He added: “We are in a period in which more important roles are being taken by small and medium-sized nations. You see the special role of France and West Germany, and countries in our part of Europe. Europe in this sense is truly new, and it is demonstrating that it can be new without being influenced by the different political systems.

“Recently we had a meeting in Prague of seven ministers from seven neighboring states. That is something unique. The issue was the environment. It will not mean anything to citizens of Los Angeles, but to people in this region, it sounds like music of the future.”

Looking toward the West, Horeni sees a “new plateau of detente.”

“I am convinced it is coming,” he said. “Mikhail Gorbachev declared on May 30 that the Soviet Union is capable, by diplomatic methods, to ensure its security.

“In the last few days, we have listened to the answer from the American side, and I am convinced that the authorities not only in my country but the Soviet Union will welcome this voice from the American Administration.”

The Czech editor does not think of himself as a cold warrior but rather says: “We were the victims of the Cold War.”

Like Starewicz in Warsaw, Horeni opposes any idea of eventual German reunification.

“I think there will be development of two German states within the framework of the two alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact),” he said. “We can wish only that on both sides, there will be created conditions for good contacts, a system of confidence, where the two blocs come in contact.”

A key point in Horeni’s view from Prague is cutting back the vast number of troops and weapons deployed in Czechoslovakia and its neighboring states of East and West Germany.

“If we want a dynamic detente in Europe,” he declared, “we have to reduce this decisive source of tension in this triangle.”

In the West German capital of Bonn, Thomas Kielinger edits a small but highly-regarded conservative weekly, the Rheinischer Merkur, which has been in the forefront in supporting the policies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

A veteran correspondent who won the German equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Washington for the Springer paper Die Welt, Kielinger believes that fresh initiatives are needed to respond to the opportunities presented by an evolving Eastern Europe.

“I think we in the West should act quickly while Gorbachev is still around,” said the 49-year-old editor, who was born in the former German city of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland, and who fled to West Germany.

“Though I may be a cold warrior, I’m not one of those old hammerheads who say, ‘Let him hang in the wind.’ On the contrary, the West should coordinate its policies and invest in Gorbachev’s survival.”

Chatting in the garden of his home outside Bonn, his round face breaking into frequent smiles, Kielinger added: “I know that something like the Marshall Plan would appeal to the idealist in the German soul. ‘Let’s help Poland. Let’s help Hungary. Let’s help any of those nations that ask us.’

“This would provide NATO with a modern new role--one that would go from the merely defensive to a whole new forward-looking approach to East-West affairs, centered in Europe.”

This theme also has been taken up in recent weeks by NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner, who also was profoundly influenced by the Cold War.

Like his predecessor, Lord Carrington of Britain, Woerner spent his career in the political and military defense of the West, as a reserve air force pilot, as a member of Parliament and as defense secretary.

And like Lord Carrington, Woerner, trim at 54, believes Gorbachev has created enormous opportunities to be seized, not ignored. He points out that these opportunities have been created by NATO’s stern and steady policies--a fact often overlooked by European electorates.

“It is a measure of our success,” he said recently at NATO headquarters just northeast of Brussels, “that the East today looks to us for inspiration and support in their struggle to inject new vigor into their own societies.”

He continued: “NATO has been a great success, and glasnost is a measure of it. But we must look ahead. In carrying out new policies toward the East, we must have informed, supportive publics in our countries.

“I fear that Gorbachev has somehow been able to take credit for initiatives actually begun by the West,” Woerner said. “We have to devote more effort to winning the battle for the minds of our European voters.”

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall, in London, contributed to this article.