Eastern Europe Fraternal Differences

By William R. Doerner

When it comes time for Mikhail Gorbachev to take his traditional late-summer vacation on the Black Sea this year, no one will be able to say he has not earned it. In the past seven weeks alone, the Soviet leader has played host to a superpower summit meeting with Ronald Reagan, climaxed by the signing of the first treaty eliminating an entire category of nuclear weapons; improved relations with religious leaders during ceremonies observing the millennium of Christianity in Russia; and presided over what may be remembered as a historic Communist Party conference that endorsed his plan for political and economic perestroika (restructuring). Last week Gorbachev turned his attention to Eastern Europe, paying his first state visit to its largest member, Poland, and presiding over a summit of the Warsaw Pact military alliance.

During both events, Gorbachev made a determined effort to use the newly won legitimacy of the Soviet reform program as a way of jump-starting similar plans in the East bloc. Though he has signaled many times that Moscow's allies are free to experiment with perestroika programs of their own, they have done so with varying levels of enthusiasm and, for the most part, not too successfully.

Gorbachev is hardly a disinterested party in the matter: failure to modernize the economies and political structures of Moscow's closest trading and security partners would greatly complicate his efforts at home, if not doom them. The big question is whether the leap forward taken in Moscow can provide momentum for the satellites. "This is a watershed moment for all of Eastern Europe," said a Western diplomat in Warsaw. "One way or another, all these regimes must now respond to the reality that Gorbachev has prevailed."

Gorbachev's four-day state visit to Poland, which included 21 public appearances in three cities, was the riskier part of his visit. His trademark flesh-pressing tours were not a guaranteed box-office success in a country that harbors an enmity toward Moscow leaders dating far back in history -- an enmity deepened by the imposition of martial law in 1981 under threat of Soviet intervention. It hardly helped matters that Gorbachev's host was Party Boss Wojciech Jaruzelski, the army general who imposed and later rescinded the military rule and who remains widely disliked in Poland. The visit, moreover, came at a time of economic crisis, with living standards for many Poles down 50% in the past eight years, largely because of government mismanagement. With ordinary Poles preoccupied by their problems, it was hardly surprising that most of the crowds Gorbachev addressed were carefully screened and polite but less than euphoric.

Even so, Gorbachev again and again surmounted the mixed popular feelings with his friendly spontaneity and sheer star quality. He reminded many Poles of another crowd-pleasing occasional visitor, Pope John Paul II, except that the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Cracow did not need to have his remarks translated into Polish. At many stops, copies of Gorbachev's book Restructuring and New Thinking were thrust into his face by fans seeking autographs. Gorbachev usually complied, though when a young fan at a wreath- laying ceremony in Warsaw passed his green neckerchief for a signature, the Soviet leader demurred. "How can I sign this?" he asked good-naturedly. "I'll tie you a knot instead." And he did.

Accompanied by Wife Raisa, Gorbachev boarded his Tu-154 jet for two carefully chosen side trips. The first was to Cracow, a seat of Polish kings beginning in the 10th century and symbol of the country's fiercely independent national identity. There Gorbachev offered a tacit gesture to the enduring power of the Roman Catholic Church, to which more than 90% of Poles belong. He and Raisa paid a 15-minute visit to the Church of St. Mary, touring its celebrated Gothic interior as guests of Auxiliary Bishop Jan Szkoden. The visit, said Bishop Szkoden, "seems to show a new attitude toward the church and believers."

It may have shown more than that. Over the past month, the church, through Poland's Jozef Cardinal Glemp, has conducted a series of informal meetings aimed at forging political cooperation between the Jaruzelski regime and moderates outside the government, including some with ties to the outlawed Solidarity labor movement. So far, the negotiations have foundered over the government's refusal to grant fresh recognition to Solidarity, which emerged as a potent challenger to Communist rule during the union's brief heyday in 1980-81. Gorbachev's unusual stopover at a functioning church appeared to provide a subtle endorsement of the bargaining process.

The ghost of Solidarity was even more pervasive at Gorbachev's other destination, the shipbuilding city of Szczecin, on the Baltic Sea. Along with former Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa and his supporters in the city of Gdansk, the 8,000 workers of Szczecin's Adolf Warski shipyard were instrumental in + founding the independent labor union. Speaking to 3,000 workers in the shipyard's cavernous hull-assembly building, a solemn Gorbachev avoided any direct mention of Solidarity, whose underground leadership had earlier issued a statement praising his reforms in the Soviet Union. The closest he came was to congratulate workers for their "full solidarity with our great work of restructuring."

In his principal address to the Polish Sejm (parliament), Gorbachev profoundly disappointed even many conservative listeners by failing to deal forthrightly with the bitterest chapter in Soviet-Polish relations: the World War II massacre of 15,000 Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviets have long maintained that those murders were carried out by invading Nazi forces, but most Polish and many other historians believe they were ordered by Moscow. A joint Soviet-Polish historical commission was formed last year and given access to previously closed Soviet archives dealing with the matter. Many Poles had hoped that Gorbachev would cut through that tedious process and apply his well-known policy of glasnost (openness) to the festering Katyn controversy. But he declined to mention it directly, saying merely, "Truth and justice can be late in coming, but they cannot fail to arrive."

Gorbachev went out of his way to bolster the stature of his host, who was widely rumored in Poland to be out of the Soviet leader's favor. "I regard Comrade Jaruzelski as my great friend," he said at one point. "I will tell you Poles directly you are very lucky to have such a man at this complicated stage of Polish history."

As the Polish part of Gorbachev's visit wound down, leaders of the five other Warsaw Pact nations began arriving in the Polish capital for their fifth summit under Gorbachev's leadership. Their number included two new members, Czechoslovakia's Milos Jakes and Hungary's Karoly Grosz, both of whom have managed the orderly departures of aging predecessors over the past seven months. Their reports to Gorbachev on the course of local perestroika reflected attitudes toward the process ranging from almost reckless enthusiasm to stolid obstructionism.

At one end of the spectrum is Hungary, which had achieved steady momentum toward reform before Grosz took charge but has since shifted into overdrive. Last week Hungary's Central Committee approved and sent to parliament an economic plan that would create new, capitalist-style commodity and money markets, allow the liquidation of inefficient state-owned companies and remove many remaining price controls. The results will not be painless -- as many as 100,000 workers are expected to lose their jobs at least temporarily -- but the changes are designed to give Hungary the East bloc's most efficient economy. Political experimentation is rampant: when Grosz gives up his old job as Prime Minister later this year, some observers expect the post to go to Imre Pozsgay, the highly popular leader of a political group allied with the Communist Party but distinct from it.

At the other end of the spectrum is Rumania, which continues to sink into a Stalinist morass under the despotic rule of Nicolae Ceausescu. The Rumanian leader, who has taken to holding a scepter in his official photographs, made his opinion of Soviet reform abundantly clear on the day Gorbachev delivered his seminal conference address in Moscow. Ceausescu convened a plenum of his own Central Committee and filled the state-controlled Rumanian press with selections from a speech that glorified his rule, relegating coverage of the Soviet leader to a subsidiary spot. In an obsessive effort to pay off his country's foreign debt by 1990, Ceausescu is exporting agricultural products in such quantities that food shortages have become widespread at home. The Rumanian leader has done at least his share in stirring unrest among the 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians in the western province of Transylvania, fueling an unprecedented and potentially dangerous intra-bloc feud. A bizarre plan by Ceausescu to raze some 7,000 ancient villages across Transylvania and other parts of Rumania, replacing them with "agroindustrial complexes," provoked a highly unusual official protest from the supposedly fraternal government in Budapest.

The other regimes of the bloc fall at various points between Hungary and Rumania, some by design and some by happenstance. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria pay lip service to the notion of reform. But Prague is so fearful that economic shifts toward free markets will get out of control that Party Leader Jakes warned last April, "No one will be allowed to capitalize on the process of restructuring." He failed to note that little restructuring had yet occurred. The regime's record on political liberalization is no better; in June it temporarily jailed 20 Czech organizers of a dissident Charter 77 human-rights conference and expelled 32 foreign participants. Bulgaria's Todor * Zhivkov, who after 31 years of rule is adept at the waiting game, got his country off to a fitful start at economic reform two years ago, but has done little to advance it of late.

Until recently East Germany's Erich Honecker was alone in the East bloc in claiming that his prosperous state had no need of economic restructuring (and in leaving unstated his rigid opposition to any change on the political level). That claim is no longer valid. Because of an increasingly outdated industrial plant and the familiar inefficiencies of central planning, East Germans are experiencing their first serious slump in living standards since they were walled off from the West in 1961. In recent months, there have been shortages of such items as fresh fruit and stylish clothing, and state industries have failed to deliver some $136 million worth of promised consumer goods. These woes, however, have not perceptibly altered Honecker's antipathy toward perestroika.

The summiteers spent much of their time behind closed doors discussing military matters, according to their final communique on Saturday, but little new ground appears to have been broken. Gorbachev had earlier suggested convening a "pan-European" conference aimed at reducing the levels of troops and conventional weapons on the Continent. Washington, which presumably would be frozen out of such a session, quickly replied that the proper forum for such issues is the 14-year-old round of conventional-arms negotiations in Vienna, at which the U.S. is represented. In other words, the U.S. seemed to be saying, any attempt by Moscow to deal the other superpower out of the arms- control game is one bit of perestroika it can live without.

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/Warsaw