Havel Urges U.S. Aid for the Soviets : Reforms: This is the best way for Washington to help Eastern Europe, the Czechoslovak leader tells Congress. He didn’t specify the types of aid.

The best way for the United States to help Eastern Europe is to help the Soviet Union on its “immensely complicated road to democracy,” Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel told a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

Aid to the Soviet Union may seem “paradoxical” in the Western world, where for years it “was a country that rightfully gave people nightmares,” Havel told a warmly applauding audience composed of members of Congress, the Cabinet and diplomats.

Today, however, “the sooner, the more quickly and the more peacefully the Soviet Union begins to move along the road toward genuine political pluralism” and a market economy, the “better it will be, not just for Czechs and Slovaks but for the whole world.”

Havel’s plea for U.S. support for the Soviets, coming from a man imprisoned twice last year for opposition to his country’s then-ruling pro-Soviet regime, goes to the heart of one of the toughest predicaments facing the United States in the revolutionized East Bloc.

Even if the Cold War indeed is over, openly aiding the Soviet Union remains an incongruous idea to many Americans, and divining how to do it without inflaming conservative opposition here or nationalist sentiments in the Soviet Union so far has stumped President Bush and his advisers.

Nevertheless, Havel chided, the sooner the Soviets’ perestroika reform program succeeds, “the sooner you yourselves will be able to reduce the burden of the military budget” on the United States.

“The millions you give to the East today will soon return to you in the form of billions in savings,” Havel declared.

In a press conference after his speech, Havel declined to offer specifics about how U.S. aid could be provided to the Soviets, saying he wanted to discuss the matter with Bush first.

White House aides said the topic was a major subject at a second meeting between Bush and Havel. The two had met for two hours on Tuesday, and their second session on Wednesday ran 45 minutes, about twice the length that had been planned.

A White House statement issued after the meeting said the two men had expressed support for Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, focused their talks on European security issues and “both agreed that the presence of American troops is a factor for stability and security in Europe.”

The troop question has been a somewhat delicate issue, as Havel has called in the past for the dissolution of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact and the withdrawal of both Soviet and American troops from Central Europe.

In his speech to Congress, however, Havel was careful to say that the end of the military blocs would take time.

Now, when “the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union and most of its satellites is breaking down” and democracy has begun to spread, “Europe will begin again to seek its own identity without being compelled to be a divided armory any longer.

“Sooner or later, Europe must come into its own and decide for itself how many of whose soldiers it needs,” he said, noting he was not trying to dictate a solution but “merely putting in a good word for genuine peace and achieving it quickly.”

What the “wayward children” of Eastern Europe are now going through, he said, is “an historically irreversible process” that “will create the hope that sooner or later your boys will no longer have to stand on guard for freedom in Europe . . . because Europe will at last be able to stand guard over itself.”

Although the Czechoslovaks have called for the Soviets to withdraw all 75,000 of their troops from Czechoslovak territory as soon as possible, Havel indicated flexibility on that as well.

“We understand the terribly complex reasons, domestic political reasons above all, why the Soviet Union cannot withdraw its troops from our territory as quickly as they arrived in 1968”--when a Soviet-led invasion crushed the “Prague Spring” reform movement, he said.

The Soviets face major difficulties finding employment and housing for troops pulled out of Europe, a problem that has slowed Gorbachev’s troop withdrawal plans.

Havel and Bush also discussed Havel’s call for a conference next year to allow all European states to meet to ratify the boundaries of a reunited Germany and bring a formal end to World War II.

A European-wide conference is scheduled for 1992, but its agenda has been vague. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has proposed a different forum--”two-plus-four” talks involving the two German states and the four postwar powers, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States--to work out the details of a new German structure.

The two-plus-four talks should be seen as merely a “preliminary” meeting, and any decisions it produces would be subject to review by a final conference “in which all those concerned should participate,” he said at his press conference.

The basis of a final European-wide agreement would have to be “general respect for human rights, genuine political pluralism and genuinely free elections,” he said.

Havel is the first of the new non-Communist government leaders to visit Washington. His speech, particularly in comparison to last year’s address by Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement, provided compelling insight into the spectrum of new leadership in Eastern Europe.

Walesa, who portrayed himself as a “simple electrician from Gdansk,” gave an emotional speech, recounting at length the sufferings of the Poles. Havel, a playwright, delivered a philosophical talk, saying that the sufferings of Eastern Europe under totalitarianism had “given us something positive: a special capacity to look.”

“As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more than an ideal,” he said. “One may approach it as one would a horizon . . . but it can never fully be attained.”

The “great advantage” of the United States, he added, is that “you have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years.”

Throughout the speech, Havel demonstrated the wit that helped him charm opponents during the difficult negotiations that led to his becoming president in late December--the first non-Communist head of state in Eastern Europe in about four decades.

At one point, discussing why Czechoslovak political leaders like himself had time to think about philosophy, he explained: “A person who cannot move and live a somewhat normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped.

“We playwrights,” he said, “who have to cram a whole human life or an entire historical era into a two-hour play, can scarcely understand this rapidity ourselves. And if it gives us trouble, think of the trouble it must give political scientists,” who, he said, “have less experience with the realm of the improbable.”

At the center of what Havel called the “philosophical” section of his speech was a call for intellectuals to take up political responsibility and help bring about “a revolution in human consciousness.”

“Intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distaste for politics under an alleged need to be independent,” he said. “If everyone thought that way, pretty soon, no one would be independent.”

Switching from Czech to English to close out his speech, Havel praised American political intellectuals such as Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. “What gave meaning” to their words, he said, was “the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words, it was his deeds as well.”

Today, he said, “If we are no longer threatened with world war . . . we are still a long way from (the) ‘family of man.’

“We still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics,” he said. “We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation and not just a part of it.”

CONCERN IN POLAND--Prime minister wants Soviets to delay troop pullout. A6