Eastern Europe: The Third Communism

EASTERN EUROPE

(See Cover)

Rumania, bah! It is neither a state nor a nation, but a profession.

—Nicholas II of Russia

The floods came early to western Rumania, spilling in thunderous green torrents from the snowy Carpathians, slashing roads to ribbons and turning towns into archipelagoes. Food was short, drinking water unsafe. It was a time when people looked to their government for action, and the Communist regime of Rumania was quick to respond. Fully half the citizens of Oradea, a city of 110,000 hard by the Hungarian border, were lining the streets when the train from Bucharest chuffed to a halt.

Through feathers of steam and shrill cries of “Sa trăiască!” (Long life!) stepped a short, square-shouldered man wearing a blue nylon raincoat and a quizzical expression. Within minutes, Nicolae Ceausescu, 48, leader of Rumania’s Communist Party and the youngest Red ruler in Eastern Europe, had changed into his “touring outfit” and was ready to roll.

Clad in knee-high black boots, a grey wool lumber jacket, well-worn brown corduroys and a visored cap, Ceausescu moved out through the waterlogged countryside, past peasants in dripping sheepskins and gaggles of screeching schoolgirls, past hat-waving horsemen who offered gifts of bread and salt, past thatch-roofed villages painted sky blue and sienna, past gargantuan collective farms and gleaming new factories. Geese hissed, dogs barked, and Ceausescu listened to gripes. Sometimes speaking from a stack of concrete blocks, sometimes from the back of a wagon, he pressed home again and again a message more familiar to Western audiences than to Communists: “We are moving now; we want your help in building a better Rumania.”

Refuting the Lie. Back home in Bucharest this week, Nicolae Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-shess-coo) quietly celebrated the successful completion of his first full year in power. Under Ceausescu and his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who died of pneumonia just a year ago, Rumania has utterly disproved two-thirds of Czar Nicholas’ caustic calumny.* Rumania today is indubitably a state, defiantly a nation, and quite proud to admit the Czar’s final point about professionalism. Moreover, it was Rumania that in many ways set the pace in the quiet repudiation of the Czar’s successors—a chain of events that has subtly altered the nature of European Communism.

As a result there are three Communisms in the world today. The virulent Chinese variety would infect the world with “wars of national liberation.” The Russian brand has graduated from the minor leagues of guerrilla warfare, and wields vast military and economic power in hopes of winning the world to Marxism through example. The Red states of Eastern Europe have developed a milder, more “relaxed” strain, one better suited to their lack of economic and military muscle. Fragmented by history and welded by ideology, they have arrived at an almost dialectical synthesis of the tensions tearing at them: nationalist, neutralist Communism.

Under both Czar and commissar, Russia’s aim in Eastern Europe since the Pan-Slavism of the mid-19th century has been to dilute nationalism and thereby exert its own will over an area that today contains 120 million inhabitants and represents the world’s fourth largest industrial complex (after the U.S., Western Europe and Russia). That grip, so rigidly imposed during Stalin’s lifetime, has loosened steadily over the past decade as the Communist regimes from the Baltic to the Black Sea have slowly found maneuvering room. Writes Rumanologist George Gross in the current issue of Problems of Communism: “A future Toynbee, looking at the 1960s, may well conclude that the central event of the current decade was the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe is fragmenting, and this process is bound to continue.”

The Rusting Curtain. The fragments of Russia’s dissolving European empire present a rough-edged mosaic to Western eyes, its pieces often inconsistent with one another, all parts undeniably Communist but just as emphatically nationalistic. The 2,000,000 Westerners—tourists and businessmen—who passed through the rusting Iron Curtain last year (a 15% increase over 1964) found themselves transported, as if by time machine, into a Europe that in appearance and manner is almost prewar. Men stalk the narrow, cobbled lanes of Warsaw’s “Old Town” clad in ankle-length leather overcoats. The taxi fleet of Budapest is made up largely of Russian Pobedas, whose grillwork and lumpy chassis resemble those of ancient Plymouths. In the faded plush elegance of Bucharest’s Athenee Palace Hotel, violins sob Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein with a sentimentality unmatched since Grand Hotel. More than 300,000 Westerners made Hungary their destination; there they dined on goose liver sautéed in butter at Gundel’s, or listened to an Eddy Duchin-like piano at the Pipacs (pronounced Peapatch) nightclub, whose pianist resembles Peter Lorre. Some 620,000 swarmed into Czechoslovakia, to shop the ancient guild houses of Prague, one of the few cities in Europe untouched by the war, or listen to ragtime at such clubs as the Viola.

A tougher regimen greeted the 200,000 tourists who went north to Poland: the chill Baltic waters and harsh Hanseatic architecture of Sopot and Gdansk (formerly Danzig). In Warsaw, a city rebuilt after being 87% destroyed in World War II, they could bargain for paintings along the broad Nowy Swiat, drink ice-cold Wyborowa vodka at the Krokodyl, or simply stare at the Vistula when the city’s drabness overcame them. Rumania stands in warm counterpoint—from the white sand beaches of Mamaia on the Black Sea, where 30 well-appointed new tourist hotels stand, to the clean, well-lighted cafés of Bucharest’s Boulevard Magheru, where one can sip sweet Pinot Noir or bitter Turkish coffee. Fully 200,000 Western tourists visited Rumania last year, and a quarter as many again will go there in 1966.

Absence of Avocado. What few Westerners remarked in Eastern Europe, however, were the things that are understandably absent, or purposely hidden from view. Traffic is scant even on the main streets of a capital (Rumania’s automobile population is a mere 10,000 among 19 million citizens). Khrushchevian “goulash”—the consumer goods that all Eastern European governments now crave—is evident but still in short supply. Because of economic planning that, despite reforms, is still harshly controlled from the top, there may be a glut of pineapple and an absence of avocado. Shoe prices can soar as high in Hungary as a week’s wages ($33) and fall correspondingly in next-door Yugoslavia.

Quality is also a hit-or-miss proposition. Rumanian “Carpati” cigarettes are so thinly packed that a smoker must slit the pack down the side in order to avoid spilling tobacco from a vertically lifted cigarette. The well-turned-out lady of Budapest buys her clothes at the shop of Klára Rothschild on winding Váci Utca, but equally handsome working-class wives do their shopping at the Great Market Hall—a vast, unheated, barnlike building where sausages and onions dangle from the beams, dung-smeared chicken eggs sell for a dollar a dozen, and delectable fish called fogas goggle stupidly from their tanks at the customers, then disappear, still wriggling, into net shopping bags.

Tourists rarely see either the intellectual ferment or the burgeoning industry of the East—the steam-wreathed polyethylene plant at Rumanian Ploesti; the scorching debate over Camus at Budapest’s Hungaria Restaurant; the clanking Skoda automobile factory outside Prague; the student jazz joint in Warsaw where frugging and free verse give the lie to socialist realism. This is also the domain of the Western businessman, of the 500 Western firms which are engaged in cooperative ventures worth $800 million in Eastern Europe, and which will do many times that amount of business in the years ahead.

A Modicum of Courage. Eastern Europe’s breakaway from Russian rule began in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Soviet 20th Party Congress in his seven-hour “secret speech.” By cracking the icon of invincibility that had held Russia in thrall, Khrushchev also unlocked—unwittingly—the forces of Eastern European nationalism. Says one Washington observer: “Nationalism is the strongest force in Eastern Europe today, stronger than ideology, stronger than the Communist parties themselves.” Columbia’s Kremlinologist Zbigniew Brzezinski puts it flatly: “East Europe is where the dream of Communist internationalism lies buried.”

Khrushchev’s speech was coincidental with popular anti-Communist risings in Poland and Hungary. Nations that had been captured and coerced by the Red Army after World War II suddenly found a modicum of courage—though Khrushchev’s tanks in Budapest and America’s unwillingness to aid the Hungarian revolt with action made caution mandatory. But Moscow finally realized that it could no longer hope to retain loyalties in Eastern Europe by mere dictation. Russian forces began withdrawing from the satellites; by 1958, the 55,000 Red Army troops that had arrived in Rumania 14 years earlier under General Rodion Malinovsky were finally pulled out. By 1961, when the ideological debate between Moscow and Peking had escalated to raucous polemics, Rumania and the rest of Eastern Europe were ready to move. Rumania took the first step by stubbornly refusing to play the role assigned to it in COMECON—the Red Common Market. Moscow wanted Rumania to continue its traditional function of gas station and breadbasket to the Communist world. Rumania refused.

Dacia Revisited. Rumania has always been Eastern Europe’s odd man out. Cupped impregnably within the broad U of the Carpathians, it long ago became a repository for recalcitrance and resistance to outside influence. Its original inhabitants, the Daci, fought as archers from horseback against the Macedonians and Romans, won fame for their century-and-a-half stand against Rome in a phrase that has come down through the ages: “Numquid de Dacis audisti?” (What have you heard of the Daci?).

Despite ultimate conquest by Rome, and later by the Turks, who ruled Rumania with Ottoman harshness for 400 years, the Colorado-size enclave retained its sense of separateness. Rumanians speak a lilting, Latinate language that sets them apart from neighboring vowel-deficient Slavs; though they say da for yes, they say bunā seara for good evening. Bloodied by the Central Powers in World War I, Rumania emerged into the modern world as a reactionary monarchy, sided with Nazi Germany during World War II; its fascist Iron Guard proved just as murderous and anti-Semitic as the SS. The Red Army conquest in 1944 was followed by a short-lived “coalition” of liberals and Communists, which soon gave way completely to Moscow’s rule.

Going Down. The Kremlin’s tool was Ana Pauker, a lynx-eyed, sphinx-bodied female Foreign Minister who ranked as high in the Kremlin’s bevy of Red Amazons as Spain’s Dolores Ibarruri (“La Pasionaria”). Ana quickly purged the Rumanian party of “nationalists”—down to and including three elevator operators in the Foreign Ministry. “National Communists” fared poorly throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1940s: Poland’s Wladyslaw Gomulka and Hungary’s János Kádar went to prison on Stalin’s orders; others, such as Czech General Secretary Rudolph Slánský and his Slovak Foreign Minister, Vladimir Clementis, were tried and hanged. From 1946 to 1953, Eastern Europe underwent show trials; the “water treatment,” electric prodding, and skillful use of the “pear” (a jawbreaking ball screwed into a victim’s mouth) yielded well over 100,000 “confessions” and subsequent disappearances.

One national Communist who eluded the Stalin purges in Rumania was Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a hardhanded railroad worker turned revolutionary. During the war, while Ana Pauker hid safely in Moscow, Dej and his associates organized anti-fascist resistance or else languished in the cells of various Rumanian prisons. By 1952, Dej and the nationalists who remained in the party had gained enough control in the Politburo to purge Ana Pauker. Dej still hewed cautiously to the Stalinist line, remained friendly with Moscow even after the dictator had died and been denounced. There were signs of the break to come, however: in 1953, Dej purged the “Muscovite” (i.e., Stalinist) elements in the Rumanian army, and two years later took over the “Sovroms”—mixed Soviet-Rumanian companies, in which Russia had always controlled 51% and which handled most of Rumania’s oil refining, river traffic and other key businesses. As always, the moves were slick and carefully timed so that Moscow was looking in another direction when Dej acted. A lover of fast cars who drove a supercharged Mercedes, Dej saved his caution for politics. But when he was ready to make his big move, the gear change was smooth and swift.

Fathers & Sons. The Dej revolt against Moscow began in 1961 with public attacks on “erroneous theories that deny each socialist country the right to build heavy industry”—a clear challenge to COMECON, which saved the heavy industrial nuggets for Russia, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and asked Rumania to be what Dej called “a mere market garden.” Simultaneously, Rumanian publications were rewritten, stressing the role of Rumanian (as opposed to Red Army) heroes in the liberation war against the Nazis. Compulsory Russian-language study was dropped from schools in 1963, the Maxim Gorki Institute was closed, and Bucharest’s only Russian bookstore went out of business. Rumanian officials who had always chatted in Russian suddenly insisted on speaking with their Soviet counterparts through an interpreter.

Khrushchev struck back in 1963: Soviet agents approached Dej’s Moscow-trained Deputy Premier, Emil Bodnăras, with plans to dump Dej in an intraparty coup. Bodnăras, who had been cooperative with Moscow in the Pauker period, promptly blew the whistle and the coup never came off. Instead, Dej grew more recalcitrant than ever. In April 1964 he declared Rumanian independence from Moscow in a 12,000-word treatise whose pivotal phrase was: “There does not and cannot exist a ‘father’ party and a ‘son’ party.” Dej added insult to filial impiety by sending Ion Gheorghe Maurer, his Premier, to Peking with assurances of Rumanian neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute.

On his way home, Maurer audaciously popped into Moscow and offered to “mediate” the quarrel—which left Nikita apoplectic. And when Khrushchev dispatched Troubleshooter Nikolai Podgorny (now Russia’s President) to the Dej villa at Mamaia, the Rumanian greeted him cordially with white wine and soda, but refused to be budged by anti-Chinese arguments. Other Red leaders, such as Italy’s Palmiro Togliatti and France’s Waldeck Rochet, joined the Dej neutralists, and finally Khrushchev had to postpone the summit meeting at which he had hoped to read Red China out of the Communist movement. Khrushchev’s fall from power in October 1964 and Dej’s death the following spring did nothing to change the balance of belligerence between the countries; Ceausescu had been an ardent apprentice.

Child of Scornicesti. Nicolae Ceausescu’s career has been carved in protest. The son of a shoemaker, he was born in Scornicesti (pop. 2,000), a farm village in the foothills northwest of Bucharest where even today oxcarts and shanks’ mare are the standard means of propulsion and peasants wear their pungent sheepskin cloaks winter and summer alike. Ceausescu’s formal education was scanty; his real learning began in 1934 when, at the age of 16, he joined the Communist Party as a youth organizer. Drumming the countryside for Dej’s resistance movement, he soon ran afoul of the Iron Guard, by 1938 found himself in Doftana Prison where he shared an 8-ft. by 6-ft. cell with Dej himself. A former inmate who now serves as a guide at Doftana (since converted to a “museum of the revolution”) remembers Ceausescu from cellblock days: “A skinny kid who rarely said a word. He didn’t whine when they kicked him. He didn’t smile when they fed him.” Fascist jack boots and stints in H cell, a solitary-confinement cubicle where a prisoner was physically unable to lie down, left Ceausescu with a stutter which still crops up now and then in his speech. The jailbirds’ best friend was Maurer, who serves Ceausescu as Premier just as he did Dej. Maurer, 63, the lawyer son of a wealthy member of the prewar bourgeoisie, is suave, cultivated, and was enough of a linguist during World War II to spring Dej from prison: dressed in an officer’s uniform and purring perfect German, he waved a handful of spurious orders and marched off with a detachment of prisoners, Dej and Ceausescu included.

After the war, Ceausescu rose rapidly toward the top, though he remained aloof from the Pauker group in the process. By 1955, at the precocious age of 37, he was a full-fledged Politburo member, two years later took charge of party organization and cadres—which made him second only to Dej in power and influence. The stocky figure with the curly brown hair and perpetually wrinkled forehead popped up everywhere as Dej’s delegate: Moscow in 1959 and 1961, Italy in 1962, Peking in 1964. On his only known Western vacation, Ceausescu checked into Paris’ Prince de Galles Hotel in 1963, along with his slim, sloe-eyed wife Elena, herself a chemist and economics writer. Elena Ceausescu won her bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1963, after Gheorghiu-Dej decided education was an asset for his underlings. At the same time, Ceausescu emerged suddenly with a degree in engineering.

Ceausescu did not inherit his predecessor’s taste for luxury, dresses modestly, has no penchant for publicity; there are no photographs of him in Bucharest’s streets. He keeps his private life so quiet that no one is sure where he lives. Dej had a chain of villas—one in Sinaia, one in Predeal, another in Mamaia, and one replete with private movie theater, a television screen that covered a wall, electronic door openers and infra-red radiators. Hard-working and humorless, clever but cautious, Ceausescu is infra-Red all by himself.

Gaullism East. Ceausescu’s Rumania shares few similarities with its Eastern European neighbors—other than a predilection for national dissimilarity, and a profound suspicion of Russia. Rumania is, in many ways, the Gaullist France of Eastern Europe. The label fits not only in Bucharest’s relations with its allies but physically and culturally as well. Fully 65% of Rumania’s foreign-language students are learning French; Bucharest even boasts an Arc de Triomphe. Berets are de rigueur in Bucharest’s working-class bistros, and the nascent Rumanian film industry—a mere 15 years old—has borrowed French New Wave techniques, along with one of French Director René Clair’s cameras, left in the country after a recent filming.

Broad boulevards and the vast, empty Piata Republicii contrast sharply with the gleaming new apartments on the city’s edge. An Italian influence is felt at Bucharest’s Continental Bar, where “Miss Dyna Mit” slithers through a tassel-tossing version of Amore Scusami. The entrance price of 10 lei ($1.60) discourages most Rumanians, but the hordes of Japanese and German, English and French businessmen who haunt Bucharest year round take up the slack. The real life of the city is best seen on a winter morning at 5:30 when the first trolleys grind across the frozen tracks and queues of workers shuffle aboard, carrying packets of bread and sausage, to head for the 23rd of August Heavy-Machinery Building Enterprise or the Snagov Cigarette Works. En route, many workers stop off for a hurried plum brandy, a hot coffee, or a fluffy pastry packed with cheese.

Top hotel in Bucharest is the Athénée Palace, a cozy confection dating from King Carol’s day. The neighboring Ambassador is newer but less colorful, though the city’s restaurants make up for that. True to Rumania’s Latin inheritance, they offer ciorba (a minestrone with sour cream) and mititei (diminutive salami as garlic-laden as any in “Little Italy”). A bow to the West takes in mamaliga—cornmeal porridge that resembles Russian kasha—which is often accompanied by sarmale, stuffed cabbage Hungarian-style. Unlike most Latins, Rumanians are not great winebibbers. Their national drink, tuicā, is as clear and catastrophic as Yugoslav slivovitz.

The Bullfight. Outside of Bucharest, the Latin influence fades quickly into what visitors call “Turkish baroque”—a conglomerate of minarets and mud walls, soaring spiked fences and rambling cattle. Cluj (formerly Klausenburg) is Rumania’s second city—with a population of 170,000 and an undeserved reputation as headquarters for Dracula, the world’s first Batman. Heartily Hungarian in mood (it is the capital of the Magyar Autonomous Region), Cluj is an intellectual center that serves Bucharest in much the same way that Cracow does Warsaw, or Leningrad Moscow. There the works of Absurdist Eugene Ionesco get a frequent hearing, and the late Rumanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi is much admired.

Cluj is also the home of Editor Dumitru Radu Popescu, 30, who touched off a storm of criticism last October with his story The Blue Lion, a scorching critique of early Communist schooling in Rumania. In one scene, Popescu and his classmates are being searched by a zealous Paukerite teacher for “poisonous” books from the perennially locked school library. “They frisked our pockets and passed their hands over our bodies,” wrote Popescu, “and since this didn’t seem to satisfy them, they ordered us to take off our clothes. I opened my mouth wide and said ‘Aaaaaaaah,’ just to show I had no books inside.” Though Red bluenoses scored the book as “decadent, trivial and pornographic,” Popescu seems safe from chastisement: the party paper Scinteia (Spark) endorsed him as “a talented author, justly praised by both readers and critics.” The regime has no praise, however, for Novelist Petru Dumitriu, a defector whose superb 1964 novel Incognito viciously dissected the Communist seizure of power in postwar Rumania.

Unfulfilled Plan. Rumania’s cultural progress lags far behind that of its neighbors in the more popular aspects. Hungary’s cocky cabarets are a fond font of Red satire and sensuality. The Budapest Night Club features sleek strippers and dexterous caricaturists, while the riverside Duna Hotel is a terminus for the 60-knot hydrofoil that plies the Danube between Budapest and Vienna, carrying 8,000 tourists a year.

Czech Performer Jirí Suchý, 34, is Communism’s top show-biz personality. His singing (4,000,000-record sales), writing (his musical, Jonas, is still packing them in after four years), and disk jockeying (600 songs that he wrote himself) have made Suchý the first “kroner millionaire” entertainer on the Czech list. His $63,000 income is 25 times the national average, and Suchý’s latest book is a summation of Eastern European cynicism: titled 100 Stories: Or the Unfulfilled Plan, it contains precisely 16 stories.

“Baby or Car?” But if Rumania brings up the rear in cultural freedom, it is nonetheless surging forward economically. With a growth rate of 13% annually, Rumania runs well ahead of the others, and even when measured by the solid standard of gross national product, it ranks fourth of seven: behind East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, but ahead of Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria. In order to keep hopping on its canny leap forward, Ceausescu’s regime relies on an abundance of natural resources—oil and timber, coal and untapped rural labor reserves. In other European countries, the supply of working men and women dwindles inevitably in inverse proportion to the desire for luxury goods. “Baby or car?” asks the Hungarian young married couple. In Budapest, where “it’s easier to get an abortion than to cure a toothache,” services-hungry city dwellers have dragged the birth rate down to a level that, if continued, could lead to a population loss by the end of the century. Rumania, with a birth rate of 14.5 per thousand, is in no such trouble, and since the main reason for Western capital investment in Eastern Europe is access to a cheap labor supply, Ceausescu & Co. seem assured of a sound future.

Rumania’s trade with the West has risen a significant 13% in the past decade: from 20% in 1955 to more than a third of the total last year. During the same span, trade with Russia fell from 69% to 41%, nearly as much as with Rumania’s Red neighbors. “Why should we send corn to Poland?” asks Premier Maurer. “So Poland can fatten its pigs and buy machinery from the West? We can sell our corn direct and buy the machinery we need ourselves.”

Rumania has been buying from a horde of hungry Westerners. The West German firm of Gutehoffnungshütte won a $20 million share in building the mammoth Galati Steel Mill at the Rumanian end of the Danube—and when the deal was consummated, at a candle-light-cum-gypsy-violin blowout in Bucharest, the Rumanian Deputy Minister for Heavy Industry, Constantin Nācutā, executed a neat hora on the tabletop. Demag and Siemens, Krupp and M.A.N. all add to a German investment in Rumania that exceeds $50 million. Italy’s Orlandi is building a $1,000,000 bakery in Rumania; Pepsi will soon be bottling in Rumania; the Japanese sell ships to Rumania in exchange for timber, which the Japanese then cleverly turn into musical instruments. France’s Pechiney has a contract for an aluminum plant at Slatina; Sweden’s ASEA is building $10 million worth of electric locomotives to replace Rumania’s wheezing steam behemoths. Chatillon of Milan has a rayon-cord-tire factory in the works near Brăila, while Italy’s Carle & Montanari will add to Rumania’s already ample waistlines with a chocolate works in Bucharest.

Bridges to Pest. Trade with the West is one thing; adoption of Western economic devices is quite another. Though Rumania has yet to employ such capitalist devices as profit incentives and supply-demand marketing, Poland and Hungary are working in that direction. But it is East Germany and Czechoslovakia that lead the region in dynamic planning. Long dogmatic in its imitation of the Soviet pattern, the Czech party last December took a bold step: it scathingly denounced its own economic policies of the past 20 years. In the works was an entirely new economic model—aimed at decentralizing the economy and stimulating production through a combination of incentives and labor-force reduction. That would mean carrying workers as unemployed—anathema to Marxists. It would also be a threat to central planning. Unfortunately, old-line functionaries, anxious to preserve their jobs and perquisites, have dug in. Pointing to a modest upturn in the lagging Czech economy (the result of a peak investment cycle), the purists have stalemated a large part of the new model.

It is precisely this sort of reaction that makes long-term progress so painfully slow. To talk of “relaxations,” whether in cultural or political control, or of economic or social reform, is to talk of ephemeras. Stanford’s Political Scientist Robert North sees Eastern Europe dressed in motley and “faced with unraveling nationalism. Everyone is trying on new clothes now, some too big, some too small, and some coming out at the elbow.” Poland, which permits great personal freedom of expression and in the arts, is currently undergoing a tight fit with religion: Catholic bishops who want to celebrate the 1,000th year of Polish Catholicism in Czestochowa this May are clashing head-on with party nationalists, who want to save the thunder for the millennium of Polish nationhood and protect the Oder-Neisse Line from West German “ecumenism” as well. As a result, Gomulka’s government denied a passport to Rome for Stefan Cardinal Wyszyńiski. Hungary is Communism’s least oppressive realm, yet the velvet glove of János Kaádár descended heavily last month on a handful of “collusionists” who protested a government price rise. Even in Rumania, “relaxation” is absurdly juxtaposed with remnants of tough police rule: the Securitate (secret police) assiduously tail suspect Westerners.

Still, Rumania’s basically nationalist example has had a rattling effect throughout the East. COMECON has come under increasing attack from many of its members, who realize that Russia has been buying them cheap for 17 years. Since Russia supplies roughly 70% of the group’s raw materials, and distances are frequently enormous (it is 2,000 miles from the Ural bauxite mines to Prague), Soviet prices are often higher than the world average.

Czechs and Poles complain in the COMECON council that they cannot get what they want in the Red Common Market, or that the goods they do get are shoddy, including East German trucks and salt-laden Soviet oil that burns out pipelines.

Some members have insisted on pre-inspection of their purchases—a shocking innovation in fraternal Communist economics. COMECON clearly needs reform, and Rumania’s next target on the list of Communist sacred cows may well be the Warsaw Pact. Already, Rumania has unilaterally reduced obligatory service in its army from 24 to 16 months, and Rumanologist George Gross says it is “quite likely that the Rumanians (like the French in NATO) have balked at infringement of their sovereignty.”

Despite these signs of disunity, all of the Eastern regimes are, simply, Communist. To expect them to change overnight is a daydream. But Communism itself is learning to adapt to human needs, is undergoing a gradual mutation that may ultimately change its form. Even among the non-Communist masses, few “captive citizens” are so distraught that they want to defect: of half a million Eastern Europeans who traveled in the West last year, only one in a hundred failed to come home. “I’m not a party member,” said a young Hungarian recently. He was standing on the Fisherman’s Bastion of hilly Buda, looking out across the seven bridges that soar over the Danube to Pest, where “Parliament” is adorned with a huge red star. “But I am most definitely a Hungarian. I love this country; I love its naiveté and its vigor. The system has not irreparably damaged these qualities, and as long as it refrains from doing so I will live here. I cannot live in the West. All systems have failings, but similarly all systems evolve.” A waiter in a Rumanian coffeehouse, surrounded by the belching chimneys of Ploesti, speaking in crude but understandable Italian, put it more simply. “Yes, it will be lovely one day. We were a very backward country, and now look what we have. And it is Rumanian, not Russian or Western. It is Rumanian.”

* Uttered in 1914, when Rumania’s Prince Carol refused to marry a Romanov daughter. No great wit himself, Nicholas borrowed the epigram from Otto von Bismarck.