COLUMN ONE : Cold War of Words Heats Up : Academics debate the decline of old-guard communism in Eastern Europe. Has socialism been defeated or reinvigorated?

Economics professor Richard Wolff expected 150 academics to attend a scholarly conference entitled “Rethinking Marxism.” Instead, about 1,500 showed up at the meeting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, straining hotels, restaurants and auditoriums.

When Wolff began planning the event in the fall of 1988, Stalinist regimes controlled Eastern Europe and perestroika was in its early stages in the Soviet Union. But by the time the meeting took place several months ago, the world had changed.

According to Wolff and other leftist scholars, the huge turnout proves that there is more interest than ever in Marxism among U.S. academics--despite claims to the contrary by their conservative counterparts.

The upheaval in the communist world “has made many more Americans who are interested in Marxism feel much more comfortable about saying so,” said Wolff, who conceded that some people may find that ironic. “When this Cold War stuff ebbs and cracks and breaks down, we can openly debate and explain without a shadow.”

Beyond any political debate, the events in Eastern Europe have sparked intellectual turmoil on American college campuses. There is a nervous rush to update textbooks made obsolete by daily headlines. Yet there is excitement about new research opportunities, and there is professorial pleasure that students are becoming more passionate about history, economics and human rights.

Conservative scholars are gloating over the West’s supposed victory in the Cold War and predict a steep decline in the study of Marxism. And socialist professors are saying the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have freed them from perceived ties with the abuses of Stalinism while depriving conservatives of their anti-Soviet intellectual anchor.

Wolff and other like-minded professors maintain that the overthrown leaders in Eastern Europe enforced repressive policies that perverted true socialism.

“The slogan I came up with is: ‘Socialism is dead. Long live Socialism,’ ” said Anatole Anton, a professor at San Francisco State University who teaches Marxist philosophy and describes himself as a democratic socialist. “The old model of statist, authoritarian socialism really has been dealt a death blow. That sweeps the slate clean and asks intellectuals to think about the meaning of democratic socialism.”

Besides, Anton and others say, few on the left had kept faith with the pre- glasnost communist systems.

It is wrong, Anton said, for conservatives to assume that American-style capitalism will suddenly blossom in places such as Romania and Bulgaria. Rather, he predicted, nations whose governments have been overthrown will look to such countries as Sweden--with its mixture of state planning, private enterprise and social welfare benefits--as models.

At Columbia University, undergraduates are asking history professor Martha Howell about whether socialism is indeed in its death throes. But Howell, who is chairwoman of the Radical History Review, a publication that often interprets history from a Marxist point of view, tells them that the toppled Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe gave socialism a black eye.

“What you want to do is get students in the class to think about how socialist states, as they existed post-war, failed to deliver the democracy as promised by the theorists. I think anybody who has worked in the history naturally makes those distinctions. But the average student doesn’t,” Howell said.

On the other side of the political spectrum in academia, conservative scholars insist that their long-held beliefs have proven true: that now-toppled Eastern European governments never had popular support and that the American military buildup under the Reagan Administration encouraged the changes. Marxism, they say, is challenged in each day’s headlines, and teaching about it faces a grim future in American higher education.

“My feeling is that we hard-liners have been right all along,” said Richard Pipes, history professor at Harvard University and former director of East European and Soviet affairs for the National Security Council in the Reagan Administration. “I think we have been completely vindicated.” Only the speed of the changes in Eastern Europe surprised him, Pipes said.

Pipes and others predict a resulting decline in student interest in Marxism in the United States, although they believe that interest in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe will continue to mushroom.

Stephen H. Balch--president of the National Association of Scholars, an organization with conservative ties--believes that a new generation of scholars will shun socialism. “They will start to learn the lessons of the world and will show more of an unwillingness to naively imbibe all that stuff,” said Balch, an associate professor of government at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Students, he said, will become more interested in the nuts and bolts of making economies and governments work.

“I don’t know how they are going to cope,” Pipes said of the intellectual left, dismissing its claims of rejuvenation.

But their opponents argue that it will be the conservatives who have trouble coping. They say the self-congratulation among conservative scholars masks a deeper insecurity. The theory that the Soviet system was inflexible--as made famous by former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeane J. Kirkpatrick--has proven false, the liberal scholars insist.

“Fear of the Soviet Union has been the basis of conservative power and thought in America since about 1948. Or I should say manipulation of fear of communism,” said Jon Wiener, history professor at UC Irvine. “What will hold conservatism together now that conservatives have really lost the bedrock of their interpretation?”

Whatever their political persuasion, however, scholars in Soviet and Eastern European studies are tossing old assumptions into the dustbin of academia.

“It is a tremendous upheaval,” said Richard Lyman, former president of Stanford University, who is now director of its Institute for International Studies. “A whole lot of stuff written even recently has to be read with a red pencil on every page. I think it’s a very big problem for everybody teaching in relevant areas.”

The result has been a rush to update textbooks to reflect the revolutions in the Soviet bloc.

“Textbooks are very far behind,” said Christopher S. Allen, assistant professor of political science at the University of Georgia at Athens. He and his co-authors are updating a book on European politics but worry that the revisions will be out of date by publication. Allen and several professors across the country report that they have stopped using certain texts and are requiring students to read foreign-affairs coverage in daily newspapers.

Much past scholarship concentrated on power struggles within communist parties and on centralized economic planning within the communist system. Now, scholars say, there is a flurry of interest in the lesser-known aspects of Soviet and Eastern European life--churches, unions, underground economies, pre-World War II political parties and ethnic minorities.

Glasnost will help, everyone agrees, by opening to Western researchers an enormous amount of previously suppressed information about the Soviet system.

“The material coming out now is very exciting indeed,” said Robert Conquest, a senior research fellow in Soviet history and international affairs at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford. He likened some past scholarship about the Soviet Union to writing about ancient Roman history by contemplating ruins and reading a few memoirs.

With the situation so much in flux, many scholars are reluctant to predict what might happen in Eastern Europe, said Conquest, who is working on a new edition of his book about Stalinist terrors.

“Somebody asked me: ‘Will Gorbachev win the political struggle?’ And I said, ‘Look, at 10 o’clock in the morning on the day of the battle you couldn’t predict the outcome of . . . Waterloo.’ ” Gorbachev’s policies, according to Conquest, are “that of a guy going down the Grand Canyon in a canoe. He doesn’t want to sink.”

William Tabb, economics and sociology professor at Queens College in New York, said one of the hardest tasks will be deciding what is worthwhile to save from past research. On the right, the idea is discredited that the Soviet system is incapable of change, he said. But so is leftist ideology that the now-toppled communist governments in Eastern Europe were evolving toward democracy.

“So much of what was written was so off base,” Tabb said. “The presumptions, the assumptions were so far off the mark.”

But despite the turmoil, there is exhilaration that students want to delve more deeply into the dramatic changes.

“This provides a wonderful opportunity in the classroom to examine 20th-Century history and the complexity of politics,” said Howell of Columbia.

Professors across the nation report significant increases in student enrollment in classes dealing with the Eastern Bloc.

“I don’t think I’ve suddenly improved as a teacher,” Andrei S. Markovits, political science professor at Boston University, remarked about the more crowded classrooms. “There is just an awareness that this is a momentous time.”

Larry Caldwell, a Soviet affairs expert who teaches political science at Occidental College, described his students as “irrepressible” in their urge to discuss current events, even when the day’s lecture is about medieval Russian history.

“The challenge for me is how to get students to look at the longer-term trends and the broader picture when their interest is so consumed by the headlines,” Caldwell said. “And I don’t mean that critically because the headlines are so interesting.”

At USC, international relations professor Steven Lamy also said that student excitement must be channeled into more than celebration about the end of the Cold War. “Most students are running around like we just won the Rose Bowl,” Lamy said, referring to campus reaction to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. He said he now wants students to focus on the many economic and environmental problems that remain worldwide.

Madeleine Albright, international relations professor at Georgetown University, said she is urging students to “free themselves from old thinking”--to be wary of scholars with vested interests.

“It’s hard even for students between 18 and 22 to take a leap and think about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe being different. They are nervous about treading new ground,” she said. “So I tell them I don’t have the answers and that I am exploring new ground with them.”