NEW KID ON THE BLOC
Loory, Stuart H.
New Kid on the BLOC Gorbachev's reforms spill into Eastern Europe BY STUART H. LOORY About seven years ago, when Poland's free trade union, Solidarity, was flourishing, stories circulated about...
...The building funds are coming in from abroad, and the government permits the churches to go up because they earn foreign exchange...
...The Catholic Church offered no noisy reaction and no resistance when martial law was imposed...
...Oh no," our host corrected sternly...
...The sales clerk had studied engineering but then decided not to take a government job...
...A few weeks later, having established a huge, vertically integrated consumer-goods conglomerate cooperative, Demjan left Scala to go into banking...
...In Debrecen, a city near the Soviet frontier, they sip beer and talk of their Mercedes or their ability to vacation on Yugoslavia's Dalmatian Coast...
...the secretaries paid dues out of their own pockets for comrades who didn't exist...
...It treats Lech Walesa, the founder and symbol of Solidarity, with contempt, but it does allow him to continue to speak out and even meet foreign officials...
...Turks are under great pressure to adopt Slavic names, and there are grim reports that in some smaller villages, police have murdered recalcitrant ethnic Turks...
...This is a time of transition in Eastern Europe...
...Many enterprising Poles have converted their vacations and business trips to the West into shopping excursions during which they purchase everything from skis to computers—merchandise they sell at huge profits when they get home...
...Both countries have buried their troubles in piles of consumer goods...
...New Kid on the BLOC Gorbachev's reforms spill into Eastern Europe BY STUART H. LOORY About seven years ago, when Poland's free trade union, Solidarity, was flourishing, stories circulated about local Communist Party secretaries who didn't have enough members on their rolls to meet the minimum required for Party units...
...At the mosque in Sofia, an elderly official told me he knew nothing of such killings...
...Mikhail Gorbachev, deeply immersed in his own reform efforts at home, has directed implied criticism at the leadership in Sofia for not pulling its weight in the cooperative economic system of the Comecon nations...
...not only was there more money to be earned, he told me, but there was more freedom in the private sector...
...And the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Ukraine meant that Western European countries did not buy Bulgarian agricultural products last summer, dealing the economy at least a short-term blow...
...They have no interest in sacrificing their security for the dubious promise extended by the unrestrained individual initiative...
...The Poles refer to this as making an accommodation with what they call the geography of the situation...
...Ottoman rule was lifted more than a century ago, but the Bulgarians cannot forget the humiliation to which they were subjected...
...And the people of Eastern Europe are fully conscious of the geographical and historical constraints that circumscribe their lives...
...Demjan told me last summer that he regarded Sears-Roebuck as his role model...
...The open, Party-controlled press is alive with new ideas...
...In 1985, I attended a meeting of the Eastern bloc's Intervision News Working Group in Budapest...
...At the end of our brief conversation, I asked him his name...
...The people of the bloc nations believe in a government-built floor of security provisions...
...Dozens of new churches that would be striking examples of modern ecclesiastical architecture in any American suburb are under construction...
...They understand the Soviet Union's determination to maintain a buffer of loyal states between itself and Western Europe...
...Jaruzelski and Kadar have learned their lessons from the fate that befell Alexander Dubcek after the Prague Spring...
...The church yard is home not only to Popieluszko's grave but to memorials for a variety of events...
...In December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski broke up Solidarity and proclaimed a state of martial law...
...However, Ceausescu is the maverick in the Warsaw Pact camp...
...They are excavating a past that links them to the Roman Empire and does not begin at the time of the Russian liberation from the Ottoman yoke...
...Lately, they have been exacting revenge...
...It is not used to describe needed changes in the system...
...The underground press born in the Solidarity era thrives as well...
...He alone speaks out in criticism of the Kremlin's nuclear-arms policies...
...At a reception, I was talking to a Japanese colleague when our Hungarian host approached and asked how we were enjoying the country...
...Instead of imprisoning political prisoners these days, the government fines them, treating distribution of underground literature as if it were a moving violation...
...Jaruzelski's government has freed all political prisoners and has met most of its important obligations under the Helsinki human-rights accords...
...The Japanese journalist said Hungary was wonderful, "as if there is no socialism here at all...
...When the banks lent him the money to establish his firm, says Gabor, "they told me I had only one job to do...
...His job has become so stressful that, though he is only thirty-three, he has been ordered by his doctor not to work the night shift any more...
...Since the Prague Spring of 1968, reform has been a dirty word in Czechoslovakia...
...Nicolae Ceausescu is one the most repressive leaders in Eastern Europe...
...The leadership is aged and, except for Jaruzelski, it has everywhere been in power for about a generation...
...Today, Kadar's government enjoys cordial relations with the United States...
...His country alone maintains diplomatic relations with Israel...
...Earlier, Demjan had helped to establish a former lieutenant, Rene Gabor, in a computer software business, Novotrade...
...At the parish level, some priests are vocal in their support of the old Solidarity ideals...
...He alone permits emigration of Jews and contacts between those who remain behind and the world Jewish community...
...Though the economy has stagnated in recent months and there is serious concern about the future, the economic reforms do not seem to be in jeopardy...
...You can travel a little outside the country...
...The East German and Czech leaders have bought stability, at least for the time being, by recognizing that creature comforts have greater appeal than ideology...
...The country's relatively small minority of ethnic Turks is being harassed by authorities who want to Slavicize the country...
...In Warsaw, the church formerly served by Father Jerzy Popieluszko, who was Stuart H. Loory, senior correspondent for Cable News Network, went on a thirty-four-day driving trip through the six Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe last summer after a three-and-a-half-year tour in the Soviet Union...
...Today, Poland is arguably the most devout Catholic country in the world, and the Church is more important than the Party in holding the nation together...
...A government worker says too many Hungarians are busy getting and spending frantically for fear that their little bubble of Western initiative will burst...
...When I wanted to buy an audio cassette of Smetana's Ma Vlast, the shopkeeper said he had it on CDs as well...
...In a country where the Church once played a leading role in fanning anti-Semitism, there is even a memorial to the Jews killed in the Nazi death camps...
...A police officer who patrols a neighborhood of such homes in Budapest talks openly of the crime problem...
...murdered by the Polish secret police for his strong public criticism of the government, has become a shrine to those who resist oppression of all kinds...
...Poles may travel inside and outside the Soviet bloc...
...When the Party gives up a job that has been filled by an ideological gatekeeper in every communist nation, it must be taken as a sign of weakness...
...What they miss in new ideas or a measure of political freedom, they gain in such readily available items as perfumes, stereos, television sets, and, lately, even compact disks...
...But Gorbachev's attempts to curb the consumption of alcohol in the Soviet Union have resulted in cutbacks in Bulgarian wine imports, harming the Bulgarian economy...
...Ceausescu has reinforced a personality cult for himself with a series of massive public-works campaigns that have drained off funds needed to institute basic economic reforms...
...Thousands of Poles were fired from their jobs when martial law was declared, but thousands more have now resigned to go to work for themselves, to open small businesses, or to work in the cooperatives that have been sanctioned by the State...
...With dollars you can obtain an apartment more quickly than with zlo-tys, and you have readier access to foodstuffs and stereo equipment...
...Kadar has even begun experimenting with political reform...
...Housebreaking and theft are rampant, he says...
...Among the bloc countries, only Czechoslovakia and East Germany seem to be resisting all impulses toward reform...
...A noncommunist, Alexander Kraw-czuk, serves today as Poland's minister of culture...
...Romania is still a strict police state...
...Its remains are propped up by the Jaruzelski government because it simply would not do for the most populous country in Eastern Europe not to have a Communist Party...
...His troops do not take part in Warsaw Pact maneuvers...
...I learned he had changed it from Turkish to its Slavic equivalent a year before...
...But the political pluralism Solidarity introduced has survived and the Communist Part is dead...
...Bulgaria suffers the historic fate of a small European country caught between East and West...
...According to recent reports, neither leadership is happy with the "reconstruction" Gorbachev is pushing in the Soviet Union...
...In fact, two economies exist in Poland today—one based on the zloty and the other on the dollar...
...Bulgaria is the other Eastern European country poised on the brink of major reform, though it has been variously denounced as a surrogate for the Soviet KGB, a drug route, and the Kremlin's most compliant satellite...
...In the upper levels of the Church hierarchy, the policy has been to extend moderate backing to moderate elements...
...None of this is to imply that socialism is being erased from the Eastern Europe political and economic landscape...
...When Sandor Demjan, who chaired the innovative Scala Metro cooperative wanted to install bar-code scanners in the co-op's department stores, the American Embassy in Budapest went to bat for him and obtained waivers on high-technology export restrictions...
...In Hungary you find "goulash communists"—owners of small businesses—relaxing on a hot summer's day on patios overlooking their backyard swimming pools in small housing subdivisions...
...Tourists and journalists may travel freely within the country...
...That was to make money...
...Among the Soviet bloc nations, only Hungary has witnessed the peaceful introduction of major reforms, though the architect of those reforms, Janos Kadar, rode to power in 1956 with the support of Soviet tanks...
...All this is tolerated both to appease the public and to help modernize the country...
...The Bulgarians talk much these days about cultural and artistic freedom...
...Almost two years ago, the Communist Party began allowing some contested elections for seats in the national legislature...
...We are a socialist country and we will always be...
...When Ceausescu goes—and because of his health that may be sooner rather than later—a power struggle is expected in Romania between the Ceausescu family and other Party elements who want to block development of a dynasty...
...armed with word processors and desk-top publishing equipment, it reportedly prints tens of thousands of pages a year of newspapers, journals, and even books...
...They criticize Josef Cardinal Glemp for being too close to Jaruzelski, and they continue to speak out...
...Todor Zhivkov, the Bulgarian Communist Party leader who came to power in the 1950s, is still hanging in, but waiting in the wings is a group of young technocrats who want to turn their sunny land into nothing less than "the Japan of Eastern Europe...
...I visited a temporary shop in Gdansk that sells the clothes, toys, and jewelry produced privately by thirty artists...
Vol. 51 • June 1987 • No. 6
