Suspending the Exodus

East Germany has acted to staunch the costly hemorrhage of its citizens by suspending visa-free travel to next-door Czechoslovakia, a no less hard-line Communist state which has suddenly become the point of departure for thousands seeking refuge in West Germany.

The move comes only days before East Germany’s 40th anniversary celebration, an event that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev plans to attend and where--so hints from Moscow have implied--he intended to urge more open European borders. Presumably Gorbachev is now either having a new speech written or, less likely, pondering the potentially incendiary consequences to civil order in East Germany if he sticks to his original text.

It’s no secret that Gorbachev finds the ideologically rigid policies of East Germany and Czechoslovakia anachronistic and increasingly distasteful. It’s no secret either that a lot of East Germans are fully aware of the deepening contrast between the Soviet Union’s changing political culture and the stagnant immobility of their own.

In Leipzig this week 10,000 East Germans sang Gorbachev’s praises as they marched in the biggest anti-government demonstration since 1953. For East Germans to prefer a Soviet leader over their own says something about what the Soviet Union is seen as becoming, but it says far more about what their own country has remained.

East Germany allowed free travel to Czechoslovakia because it trusted its neighbor to prevent any westward flight of its people. The Czech regime, though, proved unable or unwilling to halt the mass descent on West Germany’s Embassy in Prague, and East Germany decided it would be best to end the resulting embarrassment by letting all the disaffected go. Now, travel rights have been abruptly withdrawn. The effect can only be to quash the hopes of thousands who remain stuck in East Germany, further feeding an already threatening discontent. East Germany has plugged a leak, but in so doing it may have added to the chances of a domestic explosion.