Soviets’ Anchor in Central Europe Swamped by Dissent and Defection

The big question here is what the Soviets will do if East German protest erupts into nationwide civil disobedience. Local residents, loyalists to the regime and loud dissidents, remember what happened once before.

A quarter-century ago, in the East German uprising of June 17, 1953, there was no question. Soviet tanks put it down.

Today, however, a rolling in of tanks seems inconceivable. For one thing, a military response to salvage the German Democratic Republic would mean certifying that it is dead. More, military intervention would make the Soviet Union an international pariah.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has just paid his first visit to East Berlin, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Moscow’s communist client state. He was eagerly awaited, publicly by the government--and also by an expectant opposition that hopes he is an ally.

Gorbachev’s obvious purpose was not to pull the rug out from under the regime but to demonstrate solidarity. After all, the Soviet Union invented the GDR, ignoring the four-power agreement to build democracy in an undivided Germany within the boundaries of 1945.

Since that time, East Germany has been the anchor of Soviet power in Central Europe--400,000 Soviet troops live and maneuver here, in a territory about the size of Tennessee. For decades they alarmed Europeans as the embodiment of a potentially offensive spearhead. Last December, Gorbachev told the United Nations that Moscow would reduce these forces and restructure them in a defensive mode.

Meanwhile, East Germany has been losing people. This year, 60,000 left, mostly legally and without fanfare, even before the hemorrhage began in September. Then scores of thousands--mostly young, skilled workers--marked the 40th anniversary by running away. The bankruptcy of the regime they fled is irreversible. Gorbachev’s chief adviser on German affairs, Valentin M. Falin, spent a week on the spot before his chief arrived; he surely reported that bankruptcy.

Gorbachev’s public statements turned out to be brave and fraternal. But they also touched on the freedom sweeping Poland and Hungary, and on the bold experiments under way in the Soviet Union itself--political democratization, societal openness, socialist justice. He could not have better enumerated the main demands of the refugees or of the angry East German dissidents who stayed behind.

Yet East German Head of State Erich Honecker, along with other old men ruling the GDR, had applauded the massacre in Tian An Men Square. They have emphatically rejected Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika for themselves. And they did so again to Gorbachev’s face, although the Soviet president made clear his view that authoritarian command societies must change or die.

Gorbachev is the leader who simply watched the Communist parties of Poland and Hungary being pushed to the wall. He will not intervene if East Germany suffers the consequences of standing pat.

The GDR has appalling problems aside from runaway citizens. Demographically, the population is aging as well as shrinking. Economically, the system is faltering. Apart from about 30% of the economy linked to the regime, the rest doesn’t work. People tell outsiders they want to be rid of a system that tells them what to think and what to do. The refugees say they have lost faith; perhaps more important, the dissidents who remain have lost fear.

What now? The new surge of refugees recalls an earlier surge just before the GDR built the Berlin Wall in 1961 and fenced itself off from the West. Then tension subsided.

Tension may subside again--for a time. Citizens now need special permission to travel abroad. The vacation season is over for 1989 and winter cold tends to have its own settling effects. Still, the tumultuous demonstrations and defections of the past few weeks suggest that anything is possible--even lifting protest to a crescendo of civil disobedience.

Opposition inside the GDR has just begun to form. It must still organize and turn protest into a coherent platform. Western observers say that opposition components are in the palaver phase after decades of silence, discovering each other and with no apparent leader.

The shellshocked government will meanwhile try to figure out how to stay in power, using the cookie of makeshift concessions and the whip of police power to buy time. Late last week the mayor of East Berlin was talking about the need for more contacts between the government and the opposition. But, from citizen testimony, the regime has no room left to maneuver because it has reached a dead end.

East Germany--the place, not the regime--remains important to the Soviet Union as strategic anchor, political buffer and trading partner. In fact, a new element has been added. Gorbachev will not want to give his right-wing opposition the rallying cry that he “lost Central Europe” and that pulling back after 45 years would threaten to unravel the Soviet Union.

Yet just as the Brezhnev Doctrine is dead, the strategic doctrine of 1945 has shriveled away. The Red Army no longer needs maintain a massive presence as the vanguard of the Warsaw Pact. So large a military presence serves no useful purpose. In the new circumstances, friction would be inevitable.

While the Soviet Union must weigh its own security, security can be measured politically and economically--the willingness, the ability to bear the burden--as well as militarily. For Gorbachev, politics and economics are pivotal.

So the GDR’s strategic value must dim. Instead of a political buffer to the West, beyond Poland and Czechoslovakia, East Germany is becoming a liability. And as the Soviets look around the world market for quality electronics, machinery and management skills to help themselves, they find the GDR less and less competitive.

Yet a collapse or explosion would damage Gorbachev severely. East Berliners called to him for freedom, yelling, “Gorbi, Gorbi, help us.” He replied, “Don’t panic, we’ll keep trying.” He too plays time, placating the GDR opposition, pressuring the GDR government. Transition to a new status must not be seen as Gorbachev’s retreat.

Gorbachev does have a way out of this dilemma. He can exercise the only recognized right the Soviets have for being here. The four-power agreements of 1945 give the Soviet Union, together with the West, ultimate responsibility for matters affecting Germany as a whole (as of 1945) and for mediation of a peace settlement that has been outstanding since then.

This old responsibility still gives the Soviet Union a major say in Berlin and in German affairs. It would not require anything like 400,000 troops. It would require difficult diplomacy; Gorbachev could still salvage Soviet influence with statesmanship.

As great chess players, the Soviets will have studied this option. There is no sign yet that Gorbachev is prepared to make this move. His policy toward Berlin is as intransigent as it has been since the Soviets ended the last pretense of four-power administration in 1948.

Moscow still insists that West Berlin is a separate entity--without legal ties to West Germany and without German citizenship. This is a remnant of the foreign policy the Kremlin has pursued for nearly 50 years--through blockade, wall-building, bellicosity and successive crises--making West Berlin a legal orphan, to be taken into communist territory that surrounds it.

Any real indication that Gorbachev intends to revive the four-power option would be seen first in West Berlin. The meaningful withdrawal of Soviet troops from the GDR would point in the same direction. Both possibilities deserve urgent attention in the United States--and encouragement.