Moscow Redefining Relations With East Europe : Diplomacy: The demise of Communist regimes calls for new policies and institutions. But feelings of alienation complicate the task.

Seven weeks after Romania became the last domino of the East Bloc Communist alliance to fall, the Soviet Union is cautiously setting about the tough job of defining a new relationship with its East European neighbors.

It is a job admittedly complicated by what one strategist calls the “inevitable” feelings of alienation in proud countries coerced by the Kremlin for two generations, and also by the uncertainties of German reunification.

“My feeling in our relations with these countries is that we shouldn’t be trying to take any initiatives right now,” said Alexander D. Nekipelov, deputy director of Moscow’s Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System. “We shouldn’t try to press anything on them.”

However, he added, “We’re in the process of changing our policy. We have changed a lot vis-a-vis our relations with Western countries. And little by little we are also changing our attitude to what we used to call the countries of the socialist community.”

“Without change in the Soviet Union, there could have been no changes in Eastern Europe,” added political scientist Pyotr Gladkov, reflecting a widely held pride here in the role that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika reform program at home and “new thinking” abroad played in the regional revolution. “However,” he added, “the time has come to stop theorizing and begin formulating a specific policy for the region.”

The reassessment now under way goes even to the fundamental question of whether Eastern Europe is still all that important to Moscow, said Andrei V. Kortunov, a section head at the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada.

“One opinion holds that we just don’t need Eastern Europe any more,” he said in an interview. “We should be rivals rather than partners, competitors in Western markets and in seeking Western credits.”

The extension of this view is that there’s no need to change the old structures of Moscow’s East Bloc relations; they can just be allowed to die a natural death.

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze made the case for the opposite position in an interview published here late last month. While some developments in the region are a “cause of concern to us,” he said, “we respect the will of peoples who are pushing to the fore other political forces. . . . In any event, East European countries remain our neighbors, allies, and friends. We hope to continue the closest cooperation with them. Any other course would run counter to the interests of our peoples.”

This course demands not only the overhaul of such traditional institutions as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) and the Warsaw Pact military alliance but may well call for the establishment of new structures as well. Some have suggested formation of an East European parliament, similar to the West European body in Strasbourg, for example.

Like almost everything else here these days, the view from Moscow of developments in Eastern Europe and of the future of Soviet-East European relations is inextricably bound with domestic politics.

The link was obvious at this week’s pivotal plenary meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee, which made the historic decision to surrender the party’s constitutionally guaranteed “leading role” in Soviet society and move toward genuine political pluralism here.

“Sooner or later, we would have had this,” Nekipelov said of the decisions. “But I suppose (East European developments) made it sooner.”

On the other hand, conservatives in the party are turning the question “Who lost Eastern Europe?” into an issue to use against Gorbachev and his fellow reformers.

“Somebody, comrades, must answer for all the failures, for the events in Eastern Europe, about which no one here seems to want to speak,” Vladislav G. Anufriev, second secretary of the party organization in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, told the plenum delegates.

“Our buffer zone has been destroyed,” he went on. “OK--let them live as they want. But today they are already laying territorial claims on us; they want material compensation; they ransack our consulates; they desecrate the graves of our fallen soldiers and our holy places; they humiliate a great power. And we again sink hundreds of millions (of rubles) into these countries, depriving our own people, extend hospitality to all sorts of Mazowieckis”--a reference to Poland’s Solidarity prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

Anufriev is not the only one angry about what are seen here as anti-Soviet outbursts in Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. The Soviet press reports the news every time a statue of Lenin is defaced or toppled somewhere in Eastern Europe. National television has shown film of Czechoslovak demonstrations against the continued Soviet troop presence there, focusing on anti-Soviet placards and banners.

“Some developments we don’t like and we even think some of them are objectively going against our perestroika “ reform program, said Nekipelov, who worries that this only strengthens the hard-liners.

Referring to Czechoslovak government demands that at least half of all Soviet troops be pulled out of the country by mid-May and the rest by year-end, Nekipelov added: “I even understand their motive--they say they don’t know what will happen to our perestroika , and they want to get this done fast.”

But Prague risks a miscalculation, the Soviet official warned: “They think that only they have public opinion and not the Soviet Union. But now it’s not exactly this way.”

While anti-Soviet outbursts in Eastern Europe cannot be justified, Gladkov noted in a column for the latest issue of Moscow News, “we must understand our share of responsibility” for the damage wreaked on the economy, culture, and pride of the former satellites.

“They dislike not us, but ‘them’ whom we ourselves dislike,” he wrote, referring to the old-style Soviet leaders.

“Some years of alienation are inevitable after this unhappy marriage,” said Kortunov. Nevertheless, he and other strategists argue that there are ample geographic, historic, economic, and political reasons that the long-term outlook for constructive Soviet-East European relations is good.

Nekipelov said 10% of all consumer goods sold here come from Eastern Europe, a significant percentage by any standard and particularly so given the chronic shortages of such goods in the Soviet Union. Also, he noted, imports from Eastern Europe now account for one-fifth of the new capital equipment added to the country’s industrial base each year.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union is the primary supplier of fuel and raw materials to Eastern Europe.

“Even more important,” said Nekipelov, “is that a very significant part of their economies now oriented to the Soviet Union cannot be reoriented quickly to other countries, mainly because of the (low) quality of these goods.”

Even as the newly freed nations of Eastern Europe strengthen their economic and other ties to the West, the Soviet-led Comecon trading bloc will remain crucial to them “in the transitional stage,” the political economist commented. “We need each other. But they need us more.”

Ivan I. Antonovich, vice chancellor in charge of research at the Communist Party Central Committee’s Academy of Social Sciences, concurred. “I believe that with the new regimes, we could establish quite satisfactory economic relations, on which some satisfactory level of social trust can be established,” he said. The “prognosis for relations on an equal level are pretty good.”

Politically, Soviet strategists believe that their old allies will be anxious to retain good connections as a counterbalance to the rich and influential unified Germany that virtually all Europe now sees as both inevitable and imminent.

While Moscow has watched its old idea of an East European buffer zone crumble, it still has a strategic interest in seeing that whatever its politics, the region remains reasonably stable.

Maybe even more important to reformers here is that Eastern Europe remain a credible model, a “window on the West,” as one analyst here put it. In this view, while all but the most radical of those reformers see this country proceeding more slowly, and perhaps not as far, on the road of political transformation as its former satellites, those countries can still be useful in keeping the process here on track.

“There is a hope that the example of Eastern Europe will push our leadership in the same direction,” said Kortunov.