Eastern Europe: Stirrings

EASTERN EUROPE

No one in Washington talks any more about “rolling back” Communism in Eastern Europe. Now the hope is to “loosen it up.” The U.S. expects the test ban treaty, and whatever cold war relaxation that may follow, to help weaken the satellites’ dependence on Moscow and to turn them increasingly toward the West. The Eastern European countries are of course still solidly Communist, and their leaders keep warning that “peaceful coexistence” does not apply to the war with Western ideology. The loudest warnings are from East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht, who rules by repressive methods that Khrushchev himself has abandoned. But elsewhere, there are stirrings and signs of change:

∙ HUNGARY is hospitable to Western in fluence, as long as it does not offend its rulers by being openly antiCommunist. Budapest’s relatively relaxed ways are largely the result of efforts by Premier Janos Kadar to erase the bloody stains of 1956, when he personally called in Soviet tanks to crush the revolution. Finding that a lighter yoke yields greater economic prosperity and less political opposition, he has given key managerial jobs to nonparty technicians—and fired inefficient Red bureaucrats. In Budapest coffeehouses the twist has given way to the bossa nova and the Madison. Restrictions against travel have been lifted; last year 6,000 Hungarians were allowed to take trips to the West, a 400% increase over 1961, even though the frontier with Austria is still studded with minefields.

Kadar’s “respectability” finally won the regime an unchallenged seat at the United Nations. Last week from Rome, Pope Paul VI sent a message to Hungarian bishops announcing the expectation of “good news,” a hint that Josef Cardinal Mindszenty may soon be allowed by the Reds to leave the U.S. legation, where he has been holed up for almost seven years under 24-hour watch by Budapest police. After the revolution of 1848 swept the Continent, Hungarian Patriot Lajos Kossuth said that many people thought his countrymen were the “reddest republicans in Europe.” Today, Hungary’s people are fast becoming Europe’s most republican Reds.

∙ POLAND, by contrast, shows depressing evidence of sliding back into old ways. Party Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka was swept back into power in 1956 on a wave of discontent led by unorthodox Communists and westernized intellectuals. He gave them a few years of grace, then began slowly narrowing the permissible range of freedom. Still, for a Communist country the range is remarkable. Farms are 87% privately owned—and productive. The Catholic Church is incessantly harassed, but in no other Communist country is there a separate group of Catholic deputies in Parliament, or such massive public support for the church. The regime periodically cracks down on private businesses, but this month it issued an invitation to would-be capitalists to take over government-owned coffeehouses that are in the red. The kawiarnie are the center of Warsaw’s bubbling intellectual life; less stimulating, but equally popular, is the U.S.-style self-service supermarket called “Super Sam” (named after the Polish word sam, meaning by oneself). Two literary weeklies famous for outspoken verse and prose recently were merged into a single magazine with cultural commissars as editors, but Poles are sure that within a year the new weekly will be as blunt as the old ones were.

∙ CZECHOSLOVAKIA last week admitted that Rudolf Slansky, former secretary-general of the Communist Party, who was hanged in 1952 on charges of espionage and high treason, had been framed. Younger members of the party had long pressured lackluster Party Boss Antonin Novotny to admit the truth, but since Stalinist Novotny was deeply implicated in the phony trial to begin with, he resisted any move to rehabilitate his dead Red enemy. Novotny also faces rising opposition from intellectuals. At a conference of the Slovak Writers Union this spring, one man got up and openly condemned the regime for persecuting Slovaks under the guise of repressing “bourgeois nationalism.”

Living standards in Prague are the highest in Eastern Europe, but the economy has been sagging lately, and party officials are considering hiring nonparty experts for key jobs—a radical departure from orthodox Czech Communism. The birth rate has been falling for years, since couples prefer to save for a new car rather than a new baby. The drab life encourages alcoholism, which last year accounted for one out of every six suicides. Slovakians are also at lagerheads with the regime over a local beer shortage, because the famous foam of Pilsner is exported to the West for hard currency. Demands for a better life and more outside contacts are now being made publicly for the first time. Complained Milan Kundera, an author: “Isolation from other socialist countries is almost as great as from the West.”

∙ BULGARIA, also a former stronghold of Stalinist repression, is easing controls slightly, following a purge of pro-Peking Communists ordered by Moscow last year. Peasants got back their private plots; farm prices and incentives for agricultural workers were sharply increased. As a compensation of sorts to urban workers, the regime promised bigger bonuses for children.

An exhibition of U.S. plastics in Sofia last month drew up to 20,000 people a day; throughout the capital, Sofians proudly wore the plastic buttons they received as souvenirs. Said one diplomat: “It was almost a demonstration.” The regime fears such scarcely concealed anti-Communist feelings, recently cracked down (like Moscow) on its creative artists. Even circus clowns were warned to make their acts more ideological. At the same time, Communist Ruler Todor Zhivkov allowed U.S. Ambassador Eugenie Anderson to give a Fourth of July speech on television; Bulgarian diplomats now accept dinner invitations from embassy personnel. After years of stalling the U.S., Sofia finally agreed to a settlement involving more than $3,500,000 in conflicting commercial claims. Reason: Bulgaria badly wants to boost trade with the U.S., leaped at the chance to open a trade promotion office in Manhattan.

∙ RUMANIA has the highest industrial growth rate in Europe (16% annually) and, except for Albania, pays its workers the least (per capita income: $135 a year). Bucharest eagerly cultivates Western traders to supply the latest machinery for its new steel and petrochemical plants; at home political discipline is tighter than ever. When Rumanians last year flocked to see Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, the regime tried to offset its popularity by distributing leaflets explaining that the movie was really about decadence in New York City.

Still fiercely nationalist, Rumania is winning its own measure of independence from Moscow. Under Soviet plans for COMECON, the faltering Communist answer to the Common Market, Rumania was supposed to concentrate on growing foodstuffs for the rest of Eastern Europe, thus stunting its own economic growth. Refusing to be a mere “garden for the Socialist countries,” Party Leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej insisted on developing Rumania’s own natural resources. Bucharest’s feud with the Kremlin is still going strong, perhaps the first time on record that a Communist country has publicly stood up to Big Brother and not been pilloried.