EAST BLOC / UNHAPPY ALLIANCE : Soviets Collect for Occupation : There’s also a cutback in fuel supplies. And Budapest says the Kremlin owes Hungary for environmental damage.

Moscow has tightened the taps on its much-touted “Friendship Pipeline,” cutting oil deliveries to Eastern Europe and inflicting new strains on its troubled relations with erstwhile allies.

The abrupt reductions depriving former Soviet satellites of as much as one-third of their regular fuel supplies have boosted both energy prices and anti-Soviet sentiment.

Sensitivities are especially high in Hungary, where the government has been warned that Soviet troop withdrawals could be slowed unless the Kremlin is compensated for the cost of its 45-year occupation.

Col. Gen. Matvey Burlakov, the Soviet commander in charge of the withdrawals, has informed Hungary’s Defense Ministry that Moscow wants $1.6 billion for its bases and barracks.

“They are getting hysterical,” Gabor Demszky, a Hungarian member of Parliament, said of Soviet diplomats trying to place conditions on the pullout.

The Background

Both the fuel cutbacks and back-channel efforts to revise the troop pullout schedule are motivated by Moscow’s own economic ills.

Because of worsening food, energy and housing shortages, many Soviet servicemen returning home are facing a Spartan life in tent cities while authorities ponder how to provide them with new jobs and housing.

The Kremlin’s demands for compensation from Hungary are having reverberations in Czechoslovakia after hints that Moscow may seek payment there as well. And both Hungary and Czechoslovakia are tallying up their own accounts of who owes whom, saying they will bill Moscow for the environmental damage left behind by departing the troops. A Czechoslovak government estimate of $57 million worth of environmental damage was quoted this week.

Hungarian government spokesman Balasz Laszlo also has suggested that the Soviet Union may be asked to pay reparations to Hungarians interned in Siberian labor camps after World War II, or for taking part in the 1956 Hungarian revolt against communism, crushed by Soviet troops.

Hungarian and Czechoslovak media have been replete with horror stories about pools of oil and chemicals spilled at Soviet bases, polluting rivers and contaminating wells. Discarded rockets, anti-tank grenades and live artillery shells have been found at evacuated bases and training areas.

An Alaska-based environmental cleanup firm, Martech Co., is using U.S. aid funds to remove oil and unexploded ammunition from 60 former Soviet bases in Hungary.

The Price Tag

Similar cleanups are planned in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and lawmakers from the region are heading to Washington next week to press Congress to enlarge Martech’s $5-million budget.

Moscow agreed in April that its 50,000 troops in Hungary and 73,000 in Czechoslovakia would be pulled out by June, 1991. But at the time there was no mention of compensation.

The timing of the oil cutbacks, amid the row over who owes whom for the occupation, has worsened attitudes toward the Soviets, who supply more than 80% of Eastern Europe’s energy.

Soviet officials informed Budapest and Prague that their oil deliveries have been reduced by 30%-35% for the rest of the year, and Bulgarian supplies have been cut by 16%.

To encourage conservation, Prague boosted gasoline prices by 50% last week, causing mile-long lines nationwide as motorists rushed to gas up before the increase. Bulgaria, which gets more than 90% of its fuel from Moscow, has nearly doubled prices and begun cutting domestic airline flights.