The Wrong Road to Freedom

...Two years ago, in his much-discussed essay, "The Tragedy of Central Europe," the Czechoslovak writer Milan Kundera went further than most had dared to go...

...It would show that it is possible, in Marxist-Leninist terms, to " reverse history," to move it away from its "inevitable" development toward Communism...

...GySrgy Konr&d and many others in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union see national independence as a precondition for democracy...

...During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Tito agreed with, and secretly supported, the Soviet military intervention because he realized that the existence of a democratic Hungary would threaten his own position more than a pro-Soviet Hungary, at that time often hostile toward Yugoslavia...

...If the West would only offer something to the Soviets in return for their granting neutrality to Eastern Europe, he asserted, the situation would change radically...

...The reality of our present-day world tells us otherwise...

...As for neutral Austria, it was never under Communist one-party rule and poses no threat to either Soviet control or Soviet legitimacy...

...In the classical sense of the word, Tito was, and to some extent Ceausescu is, independent...

...The idea of guaranteeing the neutrality of small countries bordering on or close to the Soviet Union, a sort of updated cordonsani-taire, might have been acceptable to a prerevolutionary Russian empire and could conceivably be acceptable to a nontotalitarian regime today...

...For a Communist totalitarian state, the proximity of ademocraticsociety— particularly one that has replaced Communist rule—is far more dangerous than that of a hostile nondemocratic nation...

...The example of Marshal Tito's independence from Moscow is still very vivid in the minds of East European Communists...

...on the contrary, it can reinforce dictatorship...

...Yet their monopoly of power was and is dependent for its ideological legitimation on the presence of the totalitarian Soviet empire...

...But even Tito at one point demonstrated that his power depended more on the existence of a totalitarian Eastern bloc than on the substantial diplomatic, economic and military support he received from the West...

...Citing Austria as a precedent, Kon-r&d clearly appears to believe that the Soviet Union would agree to Eastern Europe's neutrality...

...He declared that the Eastern and Central European nations lost not only their political freedom but their very cultures and national personalities as a result of the War...

...But the protective requirements of modern totalitarian governments have changed the geopolitical picture, not the least in the area of foreign policy...

...In recent years, the point has been underlined by a steady stream of refugees from an entirely independent Albania and a somewhat independent Romania to a more tolerant Yugoslavia...

...Because the essential confrontation is not between different nations but between two entirely different types of society, democracy is a precondition for national independence and not vice versa...

...Similarly, the current liberalization in China is more dangerous to the Soviet system than the aggressive anti-Sovietism of the Mao Tze-Dung era...

...And national independence, he feels, is a vital first step toward the real democracy Eastern European nations are capable of constructing...

...Democratization in Eastern Europe would undermine the ideological foundation on which the Soviet Communist Party's monopoly of power stands...

...We must face the unpleasant fact that the overwhelming power enj oyed by East European Communists—including those in independent states such as Yugoslavia—ultimately depends on the Soviet Communists' power, and any real democratization is of equal danger to both...

...But Konrad also claimed that the West must share the blame with the Soviet Union for having kept Eastern Europe "frozen in a constrained geopolitical status quo...

...There are several flaws in Konrad's argument, the foremost being his failure to take into account the nature of contemporary totalitarianism...

...No matter how great our sympathy for the cruel dilemmas faced by him, Kundera and others, it is crucial to distinguish between current realities and hopes rooted in a rather dated premise...

...If the great powers would guarantee our sovereignty," said Konr&d, "then we would have the strength necessary to build up the institutions of freedom...

...Much of what Konrad said in New York is indisputable: One-party dictatorship in Hungary, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, was imposed as a direct consequence of the Red Army's victory in World War II...

...The reason is simple: Romania remains deeply totalitarian...

...Now a new world-wide discussion is under way, based on remarks made at the recent International PEN Congress in New York by the distinguished Hungarian dissident writer Gyorgy Konrad, who suggested a possible political solution to the problems so passionately described by Kundera...

...Events in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1980-81 all demonstrated that the peoples of those nations have never accepted repressive single-party government and are eager to establish democratic societies...

...What could be more provocative and tempting for Soviet citizens, and more threatening to the Soviet Communist party, than the democratization of a one-party system, especially in a neighMihajio Mihajlov, a long-time NL contributor whose books include Moscow Summer, Russian Themesa«rfUn-derground Notes, is currently a Special Analyst for Radio Free Europe...

...In today's world, a country's dependence or independence is linked inevitably to the global competition between totalitarianism and democracy...

...Indeed, it is precisely the capacity of the peoples of Eastern Europe to build the democratic societies Konrad cares about so deeply that is most worrisome to the Kremlin leadership...

...But they fully realize that true independence would instantly threaten them with the loss of their power...

...Relatively recent events are instructive here: In 1968 Moscow moved swiftly to destroy the first buds of democratization in Czechoslovakia, but neither the Soviet Union nor any other Warsaw Pact member has felt menaced over the last two decades by the degree of independence sovereign Romania has displayed in foreign policy matters...

...boring country...

...Moreover, as Milovan Djilas, the eminent Yugoslav critic of contemporary Communism, has more than once noted, "national Communism" does not lead to democracy...

...The dream of national independence and sovereignty in Eastern Europe must be a dream of freedom—or it will remain a dream...

...Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzel-ski, Czechoslovakia's Gustav Husak, Romania's Nikolai Ceausescu, and all the other Eastern and Central European Communist leaders also know that their power is tied to the Soviet Union...

...Perspectives THE WRONG ROAD TO FREEDOM BY MIHAJLO MIHAJLOV Munich Over the more than four decades since the end of World War II, hundreds of Eastern and Central European intellectuals have cried out, in pain and in pathos, for the independence of their countries from the Soviet Union...

...Here Konrad's argument is on much shakier ground...

...They like to play at independence and would no doubt like to be independent...