East-West Out of Control?

By Jill Smolowe

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

-- Antonio Gramsci, Italian Marxist philosopher (1891-1937)

The great variety of symptoms that confronted the Communists of East Germany and Czechoslovakia last week were not morbid, but they did carry the risk of metastasizing into something dangerous. As exhilarating as the rapid pace of change may be, the tight grip of party rule that seemed unshakable just weeks ago has loosened to the point of presenting both countries with the prospect of events slipping out of control. Though the revolution in East Berlin continues to outrace changes in Prague, the dynamics of tumult are much the same in both countries. Besieged party leaders grant one desperate concession ) after another, hoping each move will quiet the mounting outcry and preserve some measure of power for themselves. The opposition's success begets bolder demands -- and party leaders capitulate, further diminishing the very authority they hope to maintain.

East Germany's Communist Party granted the ultimate concession when its leader, Egon Krenz, and the other nine members of the Politburo resigned last week, along with the entire 163-member Central Committee. Three days later, Krenz stepped down as head of state, a move that left him stripped of the powers he had inherited only a month and a half earlier from his discredited predecessor, Erich Honecker. Manfred Gerlach, who heads a small party until now bound to the Communists, was named to replace Krenz in the ceremonial post of President. Honecker meanwhile was in quick succession expelled from the party, placed under house arrest and slapped with criminal charges. An additional 104 party functionaries and eight former Politburo members were also arrested.

The wholesale dissolution of the party leadership left some members with an uneasy sense that no one was in charge. But Prime Minister Hans Modrow seemed in command as he appealed on national television for calm, and the party hastily threw together a temporary 25-member working group to fill the leadership void. On Thursday the first talks between the Communist Party and the opposition yielded agreements to recommend parliamentary elections for May 6 and to rewrite the constitution. In addition, the foundering party advanced an emergency congress by a week to try to restore order and salvage shreds of credibility from the wreckage.

Meeting at East Berlin's Dynamo Football Club Gymnasium, the 2,714 delegates overwhelmingly nominated as party leader Gregor Gysi, a reformist lawyer who at 41 becomes the youngest Communist boss in Eastern Europe. Only three months ago, Gysi came under withering attack by hard-liners for representing the opposition group New Forum in its bid for legal status. Now, said Gysi after winning election, the Communists in East Germany will be merely "one party among others."

Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev is confronting a political crisis as the reforms he inspired in Eastern Europe begin to haunt him at home. With Gorbachev's tacit blessing, East Germany and Czechoslovakia have joined Hungary and Poland in abolishing the Communist Party's constitutional monopoly on power. Nonetheless, the Soviet leader has always insisted that the party must retain its pre-eminence in his country if perestroika is to succeed. Last week the Lithuanian legislature defied Gorbachev's wishes and legalized rival political parties, setting the stage for other Soviet republics to do the same. This week radical delegates are expected to propose a debate in the Congress of People's Deputies on whether to delete Article 6 of the national constitution, which enshrines the party's "leading role" in Soviet society.

In East Germany it remained uncertain whether the Communist Party's last- ditch effort to fashion a new identity could save it from extinction. With the party's upper echelon disgraced, the taut discipline snapped down below. A half million of the 2.3 million cardholders have deserted the party in recent weeks, and last week middle-ranking members joined the opposition groups in crying for the departure of the power brokers who for 41 years imposed their rule. Citizens worked with the regular People's Police to prevent the shredding and theft of incriminating documents. Airline flights to Rumania were suspended to block the removal of key documents. Police sealed the offices of party leaders and searched other party members as they exited their workplaces.

Some citizens seemed determined to take matters into their own hands. In one incident, about 100 people halted a man who was leaving an East Berlin office of the dreaded Stasi (secret police) with two suitcases in tow. When the man was handed over to the police, they discovered currency worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that was believed to be intended for party officials. Two days later the man was found hanged in his jail cell. The 25,000-man Stasi, meanwhile, was partly defanged by the dismissal of its directorate and the reassignment of some 7,000 agents to customs detail.

At one point, the government seemed intent on depicting a mood of impending breakdown, as if trying to ensure its survival by convincing people that only the present leaders could keep blood from flowing in the streets. In a statement issued through the state-run ADN news agency last Wednesday, the government reported "growing indications of stormings of facilities and installations of the National People's Army." But no mention was made of where the assaults took place. In a separate appeal, from the army, generals warned that they would not permit disturbances at military installations and called on soldiers to fulfull their duty "thoughtfully and reliably in these fateful hours." That same day the Defense Council resigned, leaving command of the 172,000-member armed forces in the hands of the government and the new head of state.

While army discipline never flagged, Modrow was plainly worried about the Fighting Groups, the bands of factory workers that function as the party's private army. Though the government had announced that the groups would be disarmed, it remained unclear how successful efforts were to get the group leaders to surrender the keys to their armories.

The issue of reunification with West Germany also seemed to be galloping forward faster than anyone had anticipated. Until now, the East German opposition has rejected calls for reunification. But in Leipzig, more and more posters reading GERMANY, ONE FATHERLAND are dotting the weekly demonstrations. And the round-table discussions last Thursday between party officials and opposition figures produced a call for a "new relationship" with West Germany based on "confederative structures." That echoed the language of a unification plan unveiled by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl two weeks ago, to the consternation of the British, the French and the Soviets, among others.

While East Germany faced a volatile situation -- the party dissolving but a government still more or less intact -- Czechoslovakia faced a situation that was equally volatile but opposite. The three-week-old party leadership of Karel Urbanek was holding firm despite the defection of thousands of members. Prague's government, however, was at a dangerous pass. After the Civic Forum, the country's leading opposition group, rejected a proposed new government that seated only five non-Communists among the 21 ministers, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec warned, "I cannot act under pressure of one group of citizens." When the Civic Forum refused to withdraw its demand for half the seats in the Cabinet to be filled by non-Communists, Adamec resigned.

Within hours President Gustav Husak appointed Deputy Prime Minister Marian Calfa, 43, a lawyer and relatively obscure party member, as Prime Minister. The next day Calfa seemed to meet the Civic Forum's request by offering the group half the positions in a new Cabinet. Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who leads the Civic Forum, entered into negotiations with Calfa and seemed close to agreeing on the makeup of a government. The political atmosphere was further cleansed with the announcement Saturday night that the 76-year-old Husak would step down as soon as he swore in a new Cabinet. As a quisling installed by Moscow after the invasion of 1968, Husak has become increasingly reviled, and his departure has been a prime demand of the Civic Forum.

Havel also declared he would be willing to serve as President to help guide the country through its crisis. "If, God help us, the situation develops in such a way that the only service I could render my country would be to do this, then, of course, I would do it," he said. Havel's announcement was evidence of the opposition's new determination to insert itself into the power vacuum. Abandoning its earlier plan to remain nonpartisan, the Civic Forum proclaimed that along with its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence, it would endorse a slate of candidates in the parliamentary elections that it is demanding by next July.

So far, civility and generosity have characterized the Czechoslovak revolt, which has seemed more methodical and less reactive than the spontaneous actions in East Germany. But Prague may yet follow a path that could impede reconstruction. While Havel has promised the party there will be no purges, cries for retribution began to be heard last week, resulting in the party's expelling former party leader Milos Jakes and former Prague party boss Miroslav Stepan. There are also continued signs of fragmentation within the opposition, as is happening in East Germany. But as yet, Havel continues to exert a moral authority that seems to be holding the disparate forces together.

Shrewdly, the Civic Forum is taking steps to align itself with sectors of the military. Havel announced the formation of the Military Forum, a group within the armed forces that is calling for a variety of reforms, including a shortening of military service from two years to 18 months. The Civic Forum exerted its power at the state level by forcing the resignation of the cabinet in the dominant Czech republic and the appointment of a new body that ceded nine of the 17 ministerial posts to non-Communists. Three days later, the government of the Slovak republic also quit.

Only a gambler would wager on where the revolutions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia will end. Negotiations and cool heads may ultimately prevail, allowing the Communist Party to help negotiate a future that will result in multiparty systems along the lines of those evolving in Hungary and Poland. Conversely, dissent could give way to anarchy that would trigger a military crackdown. The current challenge for opposition forces in both countries is to strike a delicate balance between keeping pressure on the Communists for new reforms and not demanding so much so fast that chaos ensues and crushes the spirit of progress not only in Eastern Europe but in the Soviet Union as well.

With reporting by William Mader/London and Frederick Ungeheuer/Berlin