Hope and Uncertainty in Eastern Europe

HOPE AND UNCERTAINTY IN EASTERN EUROPE J.E Brown Otalin put Eastern Europe into a straitjacket—more correctly, into eight separate, but identical, straitjackets. The prescribed model was of Soviet design, but "tailored" to suit countries as different from each other as any in Western Europe. As things turned out, nothing fit. But this did not deter Stalin. They had to fit, and, allowing for differences in size, they had to look alike. Stalin knew what he was doing. The rules of international relations had changed, as he told Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas. Supremacy now meant imposing your ideological system on territories taken. A totalitarian, twentieth-century version of cuius regio eius religio* had emerged. It could not last; nor did it. The Yugoslavs, the most eager of all to try it on, cast off their jacket in 1948. Since then the main theme of East European history has been the interaction between those countries trying to break out of their jackets, or at least to change them drastically , and the Soviet Union. These East European efforts have not been consistent . They have varied according to time and place. Poland's brooding restlessness has been punctuated by four explosions . Forty years ofCzechoslovak accommodation were divided half-way 1 . The principle, adopted by the Reformation Diet of Augsburg in 1555, by which the subjects of a prince were forced to convert to whichever religion he chose, be it Catholicism or Protestantism. J.F. Brown, former director of Radio Free Europe, is currently a fellow at the RAND Corporation-UCLA Center for Soviet Studies. He is the author of Eastern Europe and Communist Rule (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1988), and in 1989 was a visiting professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. 117 118 SAIS REVIEW by one memorable democratic exertion. And Bulgaria has become quite accustomed to its jacket. The Soviet response to this straining diversity has varied, ranging from meddling, massive interference, and repression , to permissiveness, neglect, and reform. The Soviet-East European relationship has been complex, but the vicissitudes through which it has passed allow only one conclusion: Soviet interests and East European aspirations are incompatible. The Gorbachev era has been compared with that of Nikita Khrushchev . The similarities extend to their policies toward Eastern Europe, especially if one compares Gorbachev to the Khrushchev of 1953 to 1956. Then, as now, the ferment was largely confined to Poland and Hungary, but the hope of change spread from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This period ended in the autumn of 1956 with a depressing, three-fold outcome . The revolution in Hungary was bloodily suppressed by Soviet troops; the apparent victory of the 1956 Polish October proved deceptive and steadily turned into defeat; and the relevance of Tito's Yugoslavia for Eastern Europe waned rapidly. The Gorbachev Ferment Although the period after 1956 saw the Stalinist system considerably modified, the brief period of ferment before it had ended in frustration. Will the Gorbachev ferment end the same way? It need not, but it could. Even if Eastern Europe gains considerable freedom, the Soviet leader could still cruelly disappoint the hopes he has raised in many East Europeans. Everything hinges on how Moscow now defines its interests in the region. For all their differences, Khrushchev and Stalin actually agreed on the multi-dimensional importance of Eastern Europe. It was of militarystrategic , ideological, political, diplomatic, and patriotic/emotional significance . (For Stalin it was also an object ofeconomic plunder.) Khrushchev , a zealot of communism triumphant, may have valued Eastern Europe's ideological potential more than Stalin. For him, these border states of the Soviet Union were to be a show-piece of socialism, and of the benefits of the Soviet connection, for the rest of Europe and beyond. Long time Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev viewed his country's East European empire more in terms of a socialist Tammany Hall than in terms of the millennium, but still adamantly refused to lose any parts of it. Hence the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and, by proxy, of Poland's Solidarity in 1981. But the lasting lesson of Brezhnev's "period of stagnation," for Moscow's dependencies...