NEWS ANALYSIS : Euphoric East Bloc Faces Tough Road to Democracy

For all the extraordinary drama of the past year in Eastern Europe, the nations of the region enter the new decade not so much transformed as in transition.

East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and even Romania have all broken, probably irrevocably, with the Soviet model of one-party Communist rule. But they are still a long way from putting down roots in the Western, liberal democratic political tradition to which most of their 110 million citizens apparently aspire.

Five of the six (all except Poland) have now pledged to hold truly free, multi-party elections in the first half of the year to install national governments that are beholden to the voters rather than the Communist Party leadership. Hungary leads the parade, with balloting scheduled March 25.

But the all-important election ground rules remain unsettled for the most part. Also, the region’s first free local and municipal elections, in which democratic change can be institutionalized at the grass-roots level, are still unscheduled.

And further ahead, all six countries face the tough job of sustaining their first, truly representative governments through essential, but painful and potentially divisive, economic change.

The ad hoc nature of so much that has happened this year in Eastern Europe was perhaps best symbolized in Czechoslovakia last week. A Communist-dominated Parliament ignored the democratic niceties to co-opt 23 new members, all but one of whom would have been termed a dissident until a month ago.

It then rubber-stamped what was essentially a deal worked out in a smoke-filled room, naming Alexander Dubcek, an old reformer brought back after 21 years of political exile, as its chairman, and Vaclav Havel, a non-Communist playwright who was in jail earlier this year, as the country’s president. National elections are promised for late spring or early summer.

It may not have been democratic, said Radio Free Europe senior analyst Vlad Kusin, but “it’s beautiful!”

Yet, some European commentators are distinctly pessimistic as they look at the distance that the eastern half of the Continent must yet travel if it is ever to become truly integrated with the West.

“Many more tears will be shed before the revolutions in Eastern Europe come to an end,” wrote columnist Robert Kilroy-Silk in the London Times last Friday. “All we can hope is that not too many are tears of blood.”

John Gray, who is on the faculty of Oxford University’s Jesus College, argues that the aftermath of totalitarianism in the region “will not be a global tranquilization of the sort imagined by American triumphalist theorists of liberal democracy,” but a return to “great-power rivalries, secret diplomacy, irredentist claims and ethnic and religious conflicts.

“It is to this world, harsh but familiar, that we are now returning, and for whose trials we should be preparing,” he said.

Columnist Ian Davidson suggested in Friday’s Financial Times that “we may even look back at 1989 with wistful nostalgia, as a rosy dawn that promised more than it could deliver.” What has been accomplished so far, he argued, “has been the easy part, and from here on, the going is liable to get much tougher.”

The bloodletting in Bucharest and other Romanian cities as the final domino fell in the closing days of 1989 was both a grisly reminder of how different things might have been elsewhere in the region and a warning of how bad they might become again if events spin out of control.

“The time of the totalitarian system has passed,” wrote Adam Michnik, a longtime Polish dissident and editor of the pro-Solidarity newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, the other day. “But that doesn’t mean that the dying totalitarian beast can’t kill.” Bucharest and the massacre of students in Beijing last June constitute “an everlasting warning,” he noted.

“I think all of (the other countries in the region) will be saying: ‘But for the grace of God, there go we,’ ” added Norman Davies, a professor at London University’s School of Slavonic & East European Studies. “I think that what the Romanian thing will do is strengthen the demand to get rid of communism. None of this ‘reform’ business.”

In Bulgaria, the reform Communist leadership installed after long-time party leader Todor Zhivkov was forced from power Nov. 10 is already under pressure to step up the pace of democratization.

The new party leader, Petar Mladenov, 53, has promised free, multi-party elections by the end of next May.

However, under the threat of a general strike by the independent trade union movement, Podkrepa, the leadership agreed last week to open round-table talks with the opposition on Wednesday. The opposition wants binding commitments not only for elections, but for immediate access to the media and human rights guarantees. It may also seek a greater transitional role in government pending new elections.

Although events in Romania may have accentuated the temptation to assess the relative progress toward democracy in the various East European nations, these countries are not football teams, and the struggle to transform themselves into liberal democracies is not the Super Bowl. Trying to rank them according to their progress can be both misleading and unfair.

Poland, for example, was the first to install a coalition government, led by a non-Communist, last summer. And many view the formation of the Solidarity union nearly a decade ago as the real beginning of the changes that swept through the region in 1989.

But Poland still has a Communist president and will apparently be the last country in the Soviet Bloc to hold fully free parliamentary elections.

Does that mean the Poles are now lagging? Not if you consider that they have adopted by far the boldest program of economic reform and that on Monday they began an extraordinarily painful transition that promises to test the political system to the limit. Inflation is expected to average 30% per month through the first half of the year, and ultimately one-third of the workers may lose their jobs.

“What the Poles are trying to do is tremendously courageous,” said East European specialist George Schopflin, of the London School of Economics. “Basically, what they’re saying is: ‘We’re going to take out all your teeth without anesthetic. And when we’re done, we’ll give you a shiny new set.’ ”

Under the circumstances, according to Radio Free Europe analyst Kusin, it would probably be a mistake for Poland to move up its elections. What Poland needs most during the next difficult months, he said, is “the kind of stability that is always disturbed by an electoral campaign.”

East Germany has scheduled elections for May 6, even though the New Forum opposition group is generally seen organizationally as among the weakest of the movements for change in the region. The most important force at work there is the lure of West Germany.

“It’s almost as if (the East Germans) are waiting to fall into West Germany’s lap,” said Schopflin. “I think it’s now become a question of when, rather than if, they reunify.”

Romania’s new National Salvation Front has promised free elections in April, although both Western and Soviet analysts have questioned whether that goal is reachable.

“I’m not quite sure by next spring, but maybe in summer,” said Nikolai V. Shishlin, a foreign-policy adviser to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, when asked about the Romanian timetable in a recent British Broadcasting Corp. television interview.

Economically, Poland apparently faces the most wrenching readjustment. But Hungary, with an even higher per-capita Western debt than its neighbor to the north, also faces painful economic change that could threaten its political stability, noted Schopflin.

Czechoslovakia, which the London School of Economics expert termed “a museum of industrial archeology,” faces a long-term problem of economic restructuring. But in the short term, it is much better off than either Poland or Hungary.

And it is a bitter irony that, as impoverished as he kept his country, the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu at least left Romania with virtually no Western debt, easing its economic problems as well.

The country left most glaringly behind at this stage of the Soviet Bloc’s transition is, of course, Gorbachev’s. It was the Soviet leader’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) that created the climate for the former satellites to break out of Moscow’s orbit.

But now, those nations serve as examples to rebellious Soviet republics, such as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldavia, and may thus be a threat to his position.

Gorbachev adviser Shishlin insisted in the BBC interview that “we already started our revolution, so I am not afraid of revolutionary changes in my country. They will go on, I am quite sure of that.”

He predicted that the leadership in Moscow will reach a compromise with the independence-minded Baltic republics, and he said of multi-party elections: “Maybe just now we are not ready. . . . But try to imagine the Soviet Union, for example, in 1993. It will be a different country.”

Will the world wait?

Radio Free Europe’s Kusin argues that Gorbachev-style “reform communism” has already lost its meaning in Eastern Europe.

“It’s democracy, open markets, free enterprise. The Gorbachev model has run out of steam,” he said.

ELECTIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE,1990

Most nations in Eastern Europe plan to hold free elections in the first half of 1990. Some have set specific dates; others have set general target dates. Poland held parliamentary elections in 1989. Hungary: March 25 Romania: In April East Germany: May 6 Bulgaria: By end of May Czechoslovakia: By summer Poland: None announced