SUNSET IN THE EAST

...It is not just that nobody in the East seems to believe in anything...

...perpetually hard times, if somewhat less hard then they were...

...That's as far as you go unless you have an appointment within...

...And this, too, after thirty-five or sixty-five years...

...to live this way is to know that one lives under a government which cannot be trusted in any respect, and to have to rely on whispered word-of-mouth...

...No one I know in the East expects it to ameliorate...

...And taken all in all, the nonsystem of the West goes on working pretty well, if more and more rockily...

...Marine, in red-striped blue, pops out of his sentry box and stops you...

...There are abundant signs that they are losing heart, but that in itself, while it may be a sin, is no crime...

...You can get anything from a car (without waiting) to a Swiss chocolate bar by walking into one of these special shops and paying with coupons, or "bons," obtainable only with Western money...

...Throughout the East bloc, every bit of the broadcast news on Warsaw was wolfed down as it came from the Western stations, from West Germany, from Austria, from the BBC foreign service, above all from the fairly reliable and extremely powerful Voice of America and from the Americans' scurrilous agit-prop Radio Free Europe...

...what is left is the appetite for nonprincipled antagonism between two ideologically indifferent empires, each with its one capital...

...nobody believes anything or anybody...

...In the East, resignation is coupled with a similarly suicidal sentiment of universal cynicism that outstrips the West's by far...

...Milton Mayer is the Roving Editor of The Progressive...

...The embassy is the hotbox of the coldest cold war in Europe...

...Our favorite salad," says a Czech, "is tomato and onion, but you get one in the summer and the other in the winter...

...And that is not taking the comparison all in all by any means...

...But when it goes on into the second and third generation, it reduces common honesty and common loyalty to the vanishing point...

...But people hunger and freeze and live illiterate and die for want of medical care in the random effervescence of the nonsystem, and nobody, but nobody, does any of those things in the dim, dismal lockstep of the communist East...

...it seemed (so the gossip went) that the Czechs had just shipped a sparkplug factory to Havana...

...Thus the communist financial system staggers dispiritedly—and dispiritingly— along from year to year and from decade to decade...

...like our government, our press (and especially our broadcast press) habitually dismisses reports, arguments, and proposals from the East with a back-page sneer...

...If you want a plumber or an electrician in the West you get him pronto, at twenty to forty dollars an hour...

...The Easterners may be said to be in the healthier position, for they are bombarded from all sides by the Western version of events via radio channels which are impossible to jam, and the Western version has some plausibility...

...If, say, 30 to 50 per cent of the American people disbelieve what their government tells them about the South Korean jetliner, 80 to 90 per cent of the people in the East disbelieve what they are told about such an event...

...They saw in Poland the emergence of a pattern that actually threw down the gauntlet to totalitarianism in a great nationwide uprising unlike the earlier rebellions in Poland, East Germany, and Hungary...

...Are we happier than they with our little lives from day to day and night to night...

...So life is, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime, no bowl of cherries for that proportion of the citizenry, varying from country to country, who are conscious of having to accept unrelenting mental and moral mistreatment as the price of physical welfare, or who engage in a lifelong conspiratorial resistance to it...

...The more recent issues had been confiscated, grabbed by guests, or never made available...

...The black money market springs up at once wherever a country blocks its own currency, and especially where other countries put pressure on it...

...Without their having to be prohibited, communist publications are scarce on American newsstands and are often stopped by the U.S...

...If we measure (or are to be measured) by music, Prague has three philharmonics—"Every Czech a musician"—and the Budapest railway workers have a full symphony orchestra of their own, with student admission everywhere free or nominal...

...So the first fine careless socialist rapture dies on the vine of careful practice...

...Item: the wage spread, apart from artistic and scientific exceptions, is of the order of ten times in a communist country, from the lowest-paid laborer to the highest-paid executive...

...An Easterner permitted to visit a Western country returns with the maximum permissible amount of medical supplies, appliances, soap, diapers, food, towels, clothing...

...Though the current try may want another millennium or two to accumulate decisive evidence, it too doesn't look too good after thirty-five and sixty-five years...

...In the "free world" free-for-all, financial collapse is not ascribed to the government...

...They have a plan...

...Just as it is in the West, the prevailing sentiment is defensive chauvinism...

...the most advanced (Czechoslovakia and East Germany) poorer...

...Here, in the realm of economic justice, is the communist trump all over the unrich world...

...It is the American embassy...

...The sentry has a camera trained on the entrance of the palatial old building across the street...

...And the Americans and the Russians have lost their appetite for principled antagonism...

...The real differences among societies are, of course, differences of degree, not of kind...

...In America they have no plan," and that is precisely the communist problem...

...Item: Wages are, roughly, one-tenth of ours, rents one-twentieth...

...No money for marble...

...They don't care about individuals"—"they," always "they," everywhere now—"they only care about groups...

...They have much less alcoholism than we have, much less suicide, much less divorce and child abuse and abandonment...

...The shops are all over the country and are always crowded with the same natives who, forbidden to have foreign currency, are permitted to have and use the bons whether they get them legally (sent by Western friends or relatives) or illegally—with no questions asked...

...The highly literate and socially sophisticated East Germans and Czechs, in particular, lead sullen and resentful lives (as do the Poles, who, since Solidarity, see the truth in the streets and hear the lies in that night's newscast...

...It appeared instantly last summer, when France restricted the export of the franc, doing away with holiday travel abroad except for those who had access to foreign currencies...

...Jefferson was never lighter than when he said better an unfree government than an unfree press...

...At noon a twenty-minute CBS news digest, containing nothing but the right stuff, is offered on closed-circuit television...

...What is wrong with the bromide that it is better to fail doing the right thing than to succeed doing the wrong...

...Nobody loves communism, but there is no more thought of a substitute for it than there is of a substitute for parliamentary capitalism here...

...In the East there is no more comprehension of the stakes in Afghanistan than there is in the West of the stakes in Beirut (or Grenada...

...The idea of capitalism is a very bad idea, permitting, as it does, one man to sit down to four meals a day while another sits down to two, or one, or none...

...This past summer and fall, it seemed ever clearer to me in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia that communism in these three radically different countries is simply emoted out, its authenticity (like the Bible's here) evaporated...

...There is a general deflation of enthusiasm for anything in a world moving relentlessly toward self-destruction, with power out of hand everywhere...

...A respected (and active) journalist in Budapest does not know of one true believer among his colleagues...

...Midsummer, too, like as not provides cabbage as the only salad in a restaurant...

...More than three years later it was still closed, still under construction...

...Just as they are in the West, the twin preoccupations of the Easterners are the procurement of bacon and beans and the fear of war...

...If you do make the mistake, an armed U.S...

...These governments cut their own throats by forbidding the possession of foreign specie and operate these special shops for their own people to attract that specie...

...A popular university student in Prague does not have a "Marxist-Leninist" in his whole acquaintance...

...But there is a press in the West to trip them up...

...library...

...All the more backward socialist countries are richer than they once were...

...The other is the anti-American disarmament movement in West Germany, spread now to the middle-aged middle class from the best of the young people who were not even born in Hitler's time...

...The unfree press—print and broadcast alike—in all of the communist countries is uniformly atrocious...

...The monopoly newspapers are simply laughable, with East Germany's Neues Deutschland leading them all in fatuity—the daily fare of a people at least as highly cultivated as our own...

...The right stuff on the library wall consists of two blown-up photographs—one of Ronald Reagan, the other (I kid you not) of John Wayne...

...the necessary materials are hard-to-impossible to come by because the central planning of the communist bloc requires the Czechs to deliver heavy equipment to the more industrially backward sister countries...

...Tyranny, a bright Yugoslav told me, is always and everywhere inefficient...

...The palatial old building has a large (not largish) American flag above the arched entranceway...

...Like dirty little children, the East Europeans are careful of what they say, and where, and to whom...

...There are two notable exceptions to the pervasive collapse of all passion apart from primitive patriotism...

...To despise the government long enough and profoundly enough is, of course, to despise the system that perpetuates the government that reduces the citizen to a stupefied subject...

...The patchwork shabbiness is everywhere evident in these beautiful old cities...

...The library has 150 American periodicals, all certified kosher, and an assortment of similarly certified books...

...The controls don't control...

...The One Big Store needn't be jazzed up to titillate the shopper...

...In Warsaw and East Berlin, as in Prague, they are nowhere to be found...

...In the course of a dozen visits to the "socialist" countries I have never met a man or woman—public officials excepted, and by no means all of those—in whom the flaming Red fervor abides...

...Last fall, I scoured Prague in vain, finding in the bar at one luxury hotel a back issue of the French Communist L'Humanite...

...Postal Service when they enter by mail...

...The news from Poland these last cataclysmic years is precisely the case in point...

...BY MILTON MAYER On Karmelitska Street is Prague's first baroque building, the early Seventeenth Century Church of Our Lady Victorious, housing the gorgeously dressed doll known as the Holy Infant Jesus...

...Living around the corner from each other, Europeans have a much more acute sense of contemporary history than we have...

...The Easterners live among the lies, large and small, they all know to be lies...

...The Western governments may be mendacious, contemptuously asserting the incredible...

...But the enmity has degenerated, on both sides, pretty much to the exchange of formal insults...

...Their one big plan falls all over itself for want of the initiative at every level that follows the competitive urge of capitalism—of cut-throat capitalism...

...A West German customs inspector once had the post-Nazi impudence to ask me whether I was carrying any newspapers from Prague...

...No money for facade...

...Thus far, and into the library, anyone may penetrate, perhaps to have his picture taken when he emerges, if, as is likely, he's a Czech student...

...There are no bargains, no sales, no closeouts, no specials, and the price, along with the merchandise, is everywhere the same, proportionately at the same cost level as ours, except for quality clothing, which is very high...

...now you can get them nowhere, and the Westerner at the border control is asked whether he has any newspapers or magazines...

...I was in Prague more than three years ago, and found Jungmannova Square in the center of the city closed for the construction of a new subway station...

...It is a sentry box, with a sentry seated inside...

...On one famous occasion when trade balance or politics—probably the former—cut off the delivery of Israeli oranges to Prague and there was no fresh fruit at all to be had, the marketplace was suddenly flooded one midwinter day with pineapples...

...The communists tried to change it...

...if by letters, even under the rod, no worse off than we are...

...Nothing else...

...You walk a couple of yards into the archway and on the right there is the entrance to the U.S...

...no one here blames the forces of marketplace hanky-panky on the White House...

...said the liberalizing Janos Kadar, "We are going to have socialism and eat," and Hungary's variety of fresh foods testifies to his non-communist determination in a world where the distribution breakdown—this too after thirty-five years, and sixty-five—is as comical as it is chronic, and as insulting to the citizenry...

...By contrast, the Western nonsystem, boom or bust, carries the conviction that it is the financiers and their clients, not the system or the government, that cannot manage an unmanageably big household...

...A week-long humanities-social science conference in Dubrovnik produces no mention of communism...

...in the East, where people moonlight illegally and nobody has the twenty or forty dollars, you wait days or weeks or months...

...The marble is in notoriously short supply today...

...It doesn't work, as it never has, and, one supposes, as it never will, not against the human ingenuity that defies all central systemization and, above all, the central systemization of finance...

...The market functions marginally—if only marginally—better than it used to in the Eastern countries...

...It is charming, and its kaleidoscopic boulevards are aglitter with the competitive glut of sugarplums...

...People there no more than here assess the quality of their little lives in terms of the First Amendment...

...Smuggled in by an occasional visitor from the West, they are snatched up and handed around until they are tattered...

...Who," said an unreconstructed old Nazi when I pointed out that there had been no free speech under Hitler, "who wants to make a speech...

...For all their mortal error in substituting force for voluntarism, the heirs of Christian communism still have the bulge on the professing Christians, for force is less sinful than hypocrisy (Acts 4: 34,35...

...Lenin's War Communism, which was going to last only until all vestiges of bourgeois attachment had been eradicated, persists in all its insulting rigidity in the satellite countries...

...In Yugoslavia, they are for sale everywhere...

...The Americans cannot forgive the Czechs (or the East Germans), "our kind of people," for their failure to throw off the Soviet yoke...

...Their child care and schooling, besides being completely free, are far better than ours, their higher schools uninfected by drugs...

...One is Poland, where, however, the prerevolutionary spirit symbolized by Solidarity is being steadily ground down by the combined pressures of the police power and the country's economic desperation...

...All in all they have the supreme moral bulge on us, to which capitalism has no retort except the big battalions or the tragic view that man is not now, and never has been, and never will be good enough to be a communist, that he simply (and the black market shows it) isn't corrigible...

...If the prohibition were actually enforced (or enforceable), the "unofficial" traffic would not exist as openly as it does on the streets, the recipients of the hard currencies having no way to dispose of them...

...The argument has some validity, but not enough validity to justify the treatment of whole peoples like children, and bad children at that, who are not to be trusted to hear conflicting voices...

...It appeared in England when the export of the pound was forbidden after World War II...

...communism (so the argument goes) is still under aggressive siege by the bourgeois world...

...his bulging bundles testify to his faithlessness in the quality of domestic manufacture right down the line...

...We Westerners, on the other hand, have no real access to contradiction or challenge of the official version we get...

...The fire has (so to say) gone out of the cold war between the communist capitals (aside from Moscow) and Washington...

...Going up the grand staircase of the Smetana Hall in Prague, a Czech gestures at the Carrara marble and says, "Our ancestors were rich...

...Once in a while, but too rarely to inhibit the trade, the Westerner may be police-trapped, but the money market is all but universal in the tourist neighborhoods...

...Everywhere in the East enterprising individuals tape Western programs for none-too-secret dissemination...

...Or that a nice try is better than no try at all...

...In the East, Marx and Lenin are read and quoted (like Jefferson and Madison here) only where they are oratorically required...

...They have done away with most crime and with much prostitution...

...There is the persistent suspicion that selected mail in both directions is opened here...

...The prevalence of the black market informs the inhabitants of these countries that their own currency is close to worthless and persuades them to dream of being in those lands where "real" money is the freely exchanged medium of commerce...

...the management was, of course, unable to enlighten me...

...After thirty-five years there is still no relaxation of the tension in Prague, no progress, for instance, in the establishment of a cultural exchange agreement such as exists between Czechoslovakia and the other Western countries...

...Whenever the occasion offers itself to ice up the relationship further, the Ami will latch on to it, refusing to half-staff their flag, for example, when a Czech president dies (not the large flag over the archway but the very large flag on top of the hill at the back of the embassy grounds, the highest point in Prague...

...Nobody in Moscow much cares any more if the Americans are good or bad capitalists, and nobody in Washington cares whether the Czechs—or the Russians—are good or bad communists or communists at all...

...What abides, there as here, and sustains these Reagans and Andropovs in their misgovernment, is bedrock attachment to the rally-'round-the-flag nation-state...

...It was thirty years ago that the wonderful old Czech communist (and Cabinet member) Vlasta Petrankova said, "It will be a long time before we have communism and a still longer time before we have communists...

...In the Bad Old Days before the Prague Spring of 1968 and its termination by the Russians, you could get a fair, if irregular, assortment of Western newspapers at any of the Czech hotels catering to foreigners...

...True, it worked pretty badly, as witness the sad story of Ananias and Sap-phira...

...There, of course, postal censorship is routine...

...the marble money goes to pay for medical care, for education, for wages, and for rent...

...They have a plan...

...The reports from Warsaw are printed briefly in the back of the Eastern papers, invariably deprecating Solidarity as a Western-inspired movement of no consequence, and are everywhere taken as falsifications...

...They accept no official output on its face except the weather, the legal notices, the football scores, and the obituaries (and not always those...

...A bright Frenchman named Montesquieu said that the slave has one liberty, the liberty to work only when he has to...

...They still, after thirty-five years, lower their voices when they speak with Westerners and prefer private homes to public places...

...Said Pator Josef Hromadka, that most fervent of Christians, "I love my Czechoslovakia, I love my communist Czechoslovakia...

...The national product at every level remains shoddy, or at least suspect...

...The communist governments have all been forced by foot-dragging pressure on the part of the farmers and merchants to let the private sector expand at the retail level little by little...

...The idea of Christ's apostles—communism—is a good idea...

...The availability of Western newspapers is as good a crude way as any to judge the effective inflexibility of the line in the Eastern countries...

...There being no official morale, there is no official demoralization when, for instance, the stock market plummets...

...In Budapest, they can be obtained easily, if spasmodically, at the "foreign" hotels...

...The general demoralization is abundantly and immediately experienced at the lowest level by the Western visitor, who cannot leave his hotel room—or, sometimes, stay in it—without being openly accosted by offers of crowns, dinars, forints, and East German marks at ridiculously low black-market rates in exchange for the hard currencies the denizens of these hapless lands are forbidden to have or use...

...Whoever has flown from Tashkent to Moscow in midsummer has marveled at the net bags of melons carried by passengers and crew (including the pilots) from dirt-cheap Central Asia to the sky-high capital...

...It is not such a fine system for those who are poor or who think they may one day be poor...

...A primitive Soviet primer began, "We have a plan...

...The polls everywhere reveal the growing opposition to the headlong course of events in the American and Russian governments, but the spirit one excavates from private and public sources, East no less than West, is resignation, the resignation of the mouse face to face with the cat and aware that he cannot get back to the hole in which he can hide...

...There is some variety and color on the avenues of the metropolis, but out in the neighborhoods, and in the small towns, the shopping streets are universally drab, with their uniform window displays and their painted storefront designations: Groceries, Bread, Meat, Pharmacy...

...True, there are few Yugoslavs or Hungarians who read a foreign language well enough to go to the trouble and expense of buying foreign publications, but plenty of East Germans would read the West German press (just as most listen to the broadcasts...

...If a good man is hard to find, a good communist is harder...

...Having seen the Holy Infant Jesus of Prague, you go down Karmelitska to the next corner, which is Trziste, turn left, and come to a largish old structure, once a residence, now an apartment block, with a kind of sentry box in front...

...The Eastern European governments actually stimulate the illegal market by operating special shops featuring imported and higher-class domestic goods...

...They have a plan...

...Modified capitalism—the modification under fire by reactionary governments and their supporters—is a fine system for the rich and for those who think they may one day be rich...

...But people are not political all their days or every day...

...But Prague's magnificent Hradcany Castle towering over the magic city is no longer illuminated except on special occasions...

...According to the gospel of Marx (and later of Lenin), the state was going to wither away...

...It is still a bad idea— so the better it works the worse it is...

...Taken all in all, it must be said that it goes on working pretty badly— "it" being the system at every social level...

...In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and to a considerable extent in Poland, Hungary, and Rumania, countries which have had the experience of open or partly open systems, the people learned early in the communist era that the system they have come to despise despised them...

...no comprehension and no interest beyond a free-floating dread of what tomorrow (or even today) will bring...

...Hard times...

...You don't make the mistake, when you emerge from the library loaded with the right stuff, of proceeding further down the archway into the embassy compound...

...The capitalists did a cruel and fairly workable job of keeping the world the way it was for a couple of hundred years...

...Did I say "kind of...

...but it is the gospel that has withered, while the state remains...

...People measure their lives by mundane considerations...

...Half of Hungary's retail trade is now in private hands...

...No money even for the proper replacement of the anciently patterned cobblestone walks with anything more than crude cement...

...To live this way for thirty-five years (or, in Russia, for sixty-five) is to have one's spirit brought, and kept, terribly low...

...In Russia—in 1917 a phenomenally backward and autocratic society— the projected short-lived dictatorship is well into its third generation...

...Ideology is dead on both sides...

...And if their lives are measured by, say, the arts, they are, on the whole, much better off there than here...