The Regimes Dwindle Down to a Shaky Few : Communism: Marxism is gone or going from nations on which it was imposed by Stalin. The question now is what to do with their wrecked economies.

The disintegration of the “evil empire,” which went on throughout 1989 at an accelerating pace, is by no means complete. But it is already possible to draw several significant conclusions about it. First, there can be no doubt that it was indeed evil. What has emerged about the nature of the regimes in East Germany, Bulgaria and Romania, to name only three, shows them to have combined corruption, hypocrisy, cruelty and misgovernment to a degree that we in the West find difficult to grasp.

The sequence of events in 1989 also confirms the historical maxim that tyrannies are overthrown not when they become too repressive but when they begin to liberalize themselves. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to introduce an element of free speech and democracy in the Soviet Union that gave the peoples of Eastern Europe hope and so encouraged them to challenge their oppressors. It was, again, Gorbachev’s decision to abolish the Brezhnev doctrine and make it clear that the Red Army would no longer be available to prop up satellite regimes that persuaded leaders in Poland and Hungary to accept far-reaching reforms. The end of the Brezhnev guarantee likewise split the East German Politburo when the crowds began to mass in Leipzig and Berlin, and so produced the downfall of Erich Honecker.

Once East Germany cracked, the domino effect began to operate, first in Bulgaria, then in Czechoslovakia, finally even in Romania, a regime equipped with security forces of such size and power as to make Red Army support unnecessary. During the Romanian uprising, the Soviet Union offered “decisive support for the people of Romania in their just cause”--an astonishing index of the degree to which Soviet policy has been liberalized.

It is important to note as well that the states from which the Communist Party has been ousted from power or changed its entire character, and where the principle of free multiparty elections has been conceded, are those where a Communist regime was imposed from the outside. In Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania (one might also add Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), the Communist Party did not acquire power either by election or its own force. It was simply, in every case, the beneficiary of Josef Stalin’s army. In none of these countries did communism have popular roots and it is a fair guess that in four or five years, Marxism-Leninism will be largely a memory.

Communist regimes have so far avoided a day of reckoning only in territories where they seized power through their own violent efforts or emerged from successful guerrilla movements--Russia itself, China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua, to give the obvious examples.

An interesting and more complex case is Yugoslavia, where the regime grew from the World War II resistance led by Marshal Tito and where it still exercises power. But, because of Serbian nationalism and the resentment it provokes in the rest of Yugoslavia, the country is beginning to dissolve into its separate parts. Once this process becomes irresistible, which will almost certainly happen during 1990, the likelihood is that communist control will go, too, except perhaps in Serbia itself. When Yugoslavia ceases to be communist, there will be a showdown in neighboring Albania.

None of the other surviving communist regimes looks invulnerable. It is now only a matter of time before Gorbachev pulls the plug on Fidel Castro’s increasingly unpopular government by withdrawing its Soviet subsidies, a step Castro brings nearer every time he subjects perestroika to savage public criticism. No doubt Castro will go the hard way, like Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania, and it is not impossible that the United States will be called upon to intervene to save Cuba’s people from a similar blood bath. If Castro goes, the Ortega regime in Nicaragua will not be far behind. The strongest of the remaining tyrannies is probably that of China, where the opposition comes overwhelmingly from the cities and the regime draws its power, past and present, from an overwhelmingly peasant army. But even in China the authorities face the dilemma raised by their intense desire to improve the economy and the impossibility of divorcing economic from political freedom. What happens in China will in great part determine the future of the regime in Vietnam, which looks increasingly weak and desperate, and the Kim Il Sung tyranny in North Korea, a clear domino candidate.

But the most important case of all remains the Soviet Union itself, where early this month Gorbachev barely survived an attempt in the new Soviet Parliament to end the Communist Party’s political monopoly and legalize a true multiparty system. In fact, political parties are already emerging and Gorbachev appears to recognize that their entry into the formal constitutional structure is only a matter of time--this, too, will probably take place in 1990. The chain of events that will probably lead to the first Soviet non-communist government since 1917 is being formed, inch by inch.

That, interestingly enough, is not even Gorbachev’s main problem. I suspect that he has already lost faith in Marxism in his heart, and will survive to lead a multiparty regime. The politics of change is simple compared to the economics of change, meaning the establishment of a true market system. This is a problem Gorbachev shares with all of Eastern Europe, where economies lie in ruins, and where virtually no politicans, administrators or businessmen have experience working in a free economy.

During 1990, the nations of the West will have to decide, in conjunction with Gorbachev and the new East European governments, the most effective way in which we can help to pull the region out of the pit of poverty into which Marxist dogma has plunged it. In the end, what these countries are likely to need most is not consumer goods or cash aid or credits, but people who can help turn the smoldering remains of the “evil empire” into a prosperous appendage of Western Europe by teaching them the ABCs of capitalism.