Making Dissenters Pay the Price

They were unmistakable as they got off the Aeroflot TU-104 turbojets and into waiting Volga cars: somewhat shapeless heavy wool overcoats, dark gray felt hats and impassive faces that, to the knowing, suggest the KGB officer. Hundreds of them were flown in from Moscow to forgather in East Berlin's grim, hulking Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters of the nation's vast security-police network. Other Russian officers were dispatched to secret-police stations around the country. According to Western intelligence analysts, this activity meant that the Soviets were now directly supervising the campaign of repression that has shaken East Germany for the past two months.

Without a Trace. A number of dissidents have reportedly been confined to lunatic asylums for expressing unorthodox opinions. Hundreds have been arrested or put under constant police surveillance. Among the most recent targets is Physicist Robert Havemann, an open critic of East Germany's Communist regime. Seized late last month at his home outside East Berlin, he is being held under stringent house arrest. Another victim is a leading East German writer, Juergen Fuchs, who disappeared without a trace after the police kidnaped him on a busy street in broad daylight.

One apparent purpose of the new crackdown is to so intimidate the country's intellectuals that they will stop the embarrassing practice of criticizing Party Boss Erich Honecker's regime from inside East Germany. A case in point is Balladeer Wolf Biermann, 40, a poet and songster who regards himself as a dedicated Communist and actually emigrated from West Germany to East Germany in 1953 because he wanted to live in a Communist-run state. Since then he has become an outspoken critic of what he regards as East Berlin's distortion of Marxism, and accuses the East German government of being "a dictatorship, but not a dictatorship of the proletariat."

Biermann's songs, though well known abroad, have been banned in East Germany since 1965. (One typical lyric ridiculing Communist bureaucrats, "Fat oxen belong in the pot/ Not in official positions.") Thus it came as a surprise when the East German authorities gave Biermann permission to go on a two-week concert tour of West Germany. Once Biermann left, the trap was sprung: his citizenship was canceled. Biermann was disconsolate, and has since pleaded to return.

Dissident artists and intellectuals are probably not the prime target of the new crackdown. It seems more designed to warn Honecker's 17 million countrymen that overt popular discontent will not be tolerated. In a recent reshuffle of the country's top posts, Honecker demoted some relative moderates and increased the power of the hardliners.

The well-disciplined East Germans had generally been models of quiescence since their futile June 1953 riot in East Berlin, but lately they have become restless. Since the spring, 200,000 of them have sought permission to emigrate, obviously taking seriously the promise of freer travel and reunification of families made by the East Berlin regime when it signed the European security accord at last year's Helsinki Conference. But only 10,275 exit visas have been granted, and most of them to elderly people. Applicants have frequently been fired from their jobs and been subjected to police searches. Some have been severely beaten by "indignant citizens" working for the police.

Better in Bulgaria? Communist bosses are puzzled by the growing dissatisfaction, primarily because their people enjoy the highest standard of living in Eastern Europe. (East Germany's per capita G.N.P. is $3,430, compared with Poland's $2,450 and Bulgaria's $1,770.) One problem is that East Germany is suffering from an acute shortage of hard currency. This is largely because of the recent price increase in oil imported by East Germany from the Soviet Union. As a result, consumer goods are in unusually short supply.

Another problem is posed by the impact of West Germany on East. Millions of West Germans visit East Germany each year, and about 70% of East Germans can receive West German television. Laments a senior East German official: "We have found it's no good telling people they're better off than the Bulgarians or letting them take vacations in Czechoslovakia. They compare their life-style to what they see on Western television and want to travel to Italy, Spain or France."

Ironically, the wave of arrests may help bring East Germany a bonanza in precious Western currency with which to buy the foreign-made goods that are in such short supply. Last week the Bonn government was continuing to ransom political prisoners from the East for as much as $15,000 a head. Since 1970, when this unsavory commerce in human beings began, Bonn has purchased 7,200 prisoners. The cost: $108 million. The West German government dislikes this grisly trade but justifies it as a humanitarian necessity. West Germans live too close to incidents such as last week's, when a West German border patrol heard a shot go off from a self-firing gun mounted on the border fence. The shot was followed by cries of "Help me! I'm dying! Let me cross!" Another escape attempt from East Germany had failed.

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