In Czechoslovakia in 1968, it took 500,000 troops weeks to restore Soviet control over the country. Without any arms or military equipment, the resistance hamstrung Soviet forces for weeks. Crowds sat in front of tanks. A brave few stuffed tin cans down the gun barrels. Throngs milled around the central radio and television station to prevent the invaders from taking them over. Civilians undertook a systematic campaign of passive resistance. Soviet morale plummeted as the people totally ostracized the troops. With near-universal popular adherence to the resistance call for “not a drop of water for the occupiers,” Soviet units were handicapped by a severe shortage of drinking water.
It is those popular uprisings, not the champagne toasts at Warsaw Pact conferences, that represent the fundamental political reality of Eastern Europe. Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, East Germans, Romanians, and Bulgarians are strong peoples, and they are our allies in the U.S.–Soviet competition. Our strategy for peaceful competition must capitalize on their strength.
East European communist leaders are pulled in opposite directions by two factors, their desire for legitimacy in the eyes of their peoples and their dependence on the Soviet Union to stay in power. These governments are not legitimate. They were imposed by Soviet arms, and they are maintained by Soviet arms. No one in these countries—not even the members of their governments—would dispute these facts. As a result, East European communist leaders have a desperate desire to be seen as legitimate rulers. It is the central preoccupation of every East European communist leader I have ever met.
This acute insecurity came through with eloquent clarity in the narrative of the climactic events of the Hungarian uprising in the memoirs of András Hegedüs, the Stalinist Prime Minister of the country at the time. He wrote: “I . . . got to my feet and looked out of the window: I could see that the head of the demonstration had reached the middle of the Margaret Bridge [on the way to the government’s building]. It was a terrifying sight. Even if I had not seen it coming, I should then have realized that here was national resistance developing against the central leadership and against the policies of the old leaders, including myself. I saw quite clearly—this is it, the people are coming.”
East European communist leaders face a difficult dilemma. Legitimacy can come only from greater national independence or better economic performance. Independence requires policies that distance the country from the Soviet Union. Economic growth requires reforms that depart from the Soviet model. Either would clearly displease the Soviet leaders—and it is at their pleasure that the rulers of Eastern Europe hold office. This basic tension produces different kinds of communist leaders in Eastern Europe. Some, like Hegedüs, tie themselves inextricably to Moscow. Most seek to create a margin of independence without severing their lifeline to Moscow or prompting a Soviet invasion. And like Dubček, a few genuinely want to change the system from within.
Eastern Europe today is ripe for positive peaceful change. In 1983, I traveled throughout Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and met with several Eastern-bloc leaders and hundreds of private citizens. One message came through loud and clear: doctrinaire communism was dead as a motivating force. That was clear in the sullen manner in which common people pursued their lives. It was even clearer in the conversations I had with East European leaders. They recognized the fact that a fundamental incompatibility existed between the interests of their countries and those of the Soviet Union and that the Soviet model of economic development was irrelevant in Eastern Europe.
Soviet-style economic planning has failed to provide the peoples of Eastern Europe even with the basic necessities of life. In stark contrast to their neighbors in Western Europe, these countries have literally entered a period of economic decline. In the 1980s, their economies have grown less than one percent per year. Since their populations have been growing at a more rapid pace, the standard of living has been dropping. The countries of Eastern Europe have run up against a hard but inalterable fact: Rigid bureaucratic planning cannot create a dynamic economy. East European countries must undertake fundamental economic reforms. Without them, they will sink into the quicksand of economic stagnation. To try to muddle through will only mire them more deeply.
There has been a total loss of faith among East European communists. Most today are careerists and bureaucrats. The will and confidence of the communist parties have been broken. Many of their leaders want to deviate from the Soviet economic model and to improve their own relations with the West in order to open up possibilities for internal reform. The rising generation of East Europeans are not ideologues but pragmatists—and pragmatism creates openings for peaceful change.
This is particularly true with Gorbachev in power. He has alienated East European leaders by calling for greater coordination among Eastern-bloc economies and by ending the Soviet subsidies on some exports, like oil. But his policy of Glasnost will reduce, not increase, his control over Eastern Europe. His call for greater openness in public criticism will lead inevitably to pressure within East European countries and communist parties to put more distance between themselves and Moscow. Gorbachev might intend his Glasnost campaign to serve as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction and as a weapon against his political foes. He might not mean his rhetoric to be taken literally, but it will be so understood in Eastern Europe.
If the Soviet Union and its clients respond to the challenges before them with half measures, they might make marginal progress for a time, but they will not be able to energize the peoples in Eastern Europe to support their governments. That failure will generate still more pressure for greater changes. Since World War II, the tectonic plate of Soviet imperialism has been pushing against that of Eastern European nationalism. These forces have produced tremors in the past, but unprecedented pressures will build up along the fault line in the 1990s. Without genuine reform, a political earthquake in Eastern Europe is inevitable in the years before 1999.
Gorbachev has announced a willingness to allow his East European satellites to pursue independent approaches to internal reform. But he has also made clear that two limits must be observed. The communist system must remain intact, and ultimate control by the Soviet Union must remain unquestioned. What he fails to realize is that stagnation in Eastern Europe stems not just from the idiocies of communist economic systems; it also results from the heavy hand of Soviet imperialism. Before the American Civil War, freemen in the North produced far more per capita than slaves in the South. Oppression, not only of individuals but also of nations, breeds social and economic stagnation. East European peoples will not break out of this inertia until they achieve a real degree of control over their national destinies.
Our challenge is to formulate a strategy to increase the chances that from these inherent pressures will emerge positive peaceful change. We must first clarify what our policy should not be. We must not make it our goal to create states in Eastern Europe which are aligned against and openly hostile to the Soviet Union. Nor should it be our policy to destabilize these countries by supporting freedom fighters within their borders. Given the Soviet Union’s overwhelming military superiority in the region, that would be nothing more than offering freedom fighters up for slaughter.
Our long-term goal should be to create independent states that have open societies domestically and that pose no threat to the Soviet Union. In a sense, our goal is to “Finlandize” the countries of Eastern Europe. Our policy should be to encourage the people of Eastern Europe to push for incremental increases in their freedom and to create incentives for their governments to grant those freedoms and to push for incremental increases in their independence from the Soviet Union. Moscow cannot invade an East European country every time its people increase the scope of free communications or every time its government allows market forces to exert more influence in determining economic prices. We need to help foster a process of accumulating small, marginal gains. It might seem frustrating, even futile. Yet, it is the only way that these countries will ever a
chieve a measure of national freedom.
How can the United States encourage this process? A precondition for peaceful change is military deterrence. It is essential that the Soviet Union not be perceived as the supreme military power. As soon as the West demonstrates that it cannot be cowed into submission, the peoples of the East will seek to assert themselves more actively. If the West cannot muster an adequate military deterrent to Soviet intimidation, we cannot expect East European peoples to defy the Kremlin.
Beyond deterrence, our strategy for peaceful change in Eastern Europe must have four elements. First, we must seek a relaxation of American–Soviet tensions. While many anticommunists in the West have reviled the policy of détente which I adopted as President in the early 1970s, the anticommunists in the East supported this approach wholeheartedly. International tension strengthens a dictatorship, and a relaxation of those tensions weakens a dictatorship. No one would deny that our policy of détente in the 1970s contributed greatly to the events which led to the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Even one of the fiercest, though most responsible, critics of détente, Richard Pipes, conceded this point in writing about its effects on the Soviet system. He wrote that détente “undoubtedly accelerated the process by which society in the USSR began to resist controls.” He added that, for the Soviets, “To proclaim the Cold War over—even while repeating ad nauseam that the struggle between the two systems must go on to the bitter end—is to put in question the need in Russia for a repressive regime.” If détente had this effect in the Soviet Union, its impact in Eastern Europe was tenfold greater.
A relaxation of tensions undermines the rationale for communist governments. As it is, the communists of Eastern Europe have a lot of explaining to do. They have to explain why they have subordinated themselves to Moscow, why they repress political and intellectual freedom, why they cannot overcome economic backwardness, and why they permit social privilege based on political position. They justify all of this in terms of the supposed military threat from the West. Better American–Soviet relations make this argument unsustainable. Communist rule is exposed as the rule of naked force. This inexorably pushes the communists to seek legitimacy through reform or greater national independence.
Second, we must seek to maximize Western contact with the peoples of Eastern Europe. A relaxation of superpower tensions facilitates greater contact. But we must vigorously pursue it. We should increase our trade and our cultural-exchange programs with Eastern Europe. We should devote more resources to foreign radio broadcasting into the area. The more contact we have with the East, the more we open it to the force of the example of the West. That is a force which even the communist elites will have difficulty resisting.
Moreover, these countries face great problems for which the Soviet Union has no solutions to offer. In the years before 1999, for example, Eastern Europe will confront a major ecological crisis. While the West has grappled with the problem of industrial pollution for twenty years, Soviet-bloc countries have totally ignored it. The nightmare forecasts of American environmentalists in the 1960s could very well come about in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Beset with its own ecological problem, Moscow has nothing to offer Eastern Europe in this area. We in the West do—and we should take the initiative because through our actions we can significantly improve the quality of life of the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Third, we must seek a reduction in American and Soviet conventional forces in Europe. The less military force the Soviet Union has in Eastern Europe, the less control it has over Eastern Europe. Moscow has no troops in Romania, and Romania will not give Moscow the right to station any there in peacetime. That has given Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu the ability to diverge from Soviet positions on international issues. While no one would claim that his domestic policies are anything but severely repressive, no one can deny that he has carved out a real measure of national independence in foreign policy. We must therefore make conventional arms reductions a major focus of arms control.
Fourth, we must seek to work with East European communist leaders who want to implement genuine reforms. There are those who argue that a communist is a communist and that all East European leaders are beyond the pale. In this view, the United States should break all contacts with these regimes. That is the worst mistake we could make. It is essential that we always keep in mind that some of the greatest challenges to Soviet control over Eastern Europe have arisen within the satellite communist parties. Marshal Tito sprang Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc in 1948. Imre Nagy led the Hungarian rebellion in 1956. Wladyslav Gomulka faced Khrushchev down on the key issue of agricultural collectivization in Poland in 1956. Enver Hoxha split Albania away from the Soviet Union in 1961. Ceausescu distanced Romania from the Soviet line on some international issues in the 1960s. Dubek brought about the Prague Spring in 1968. Edward Gierek’s regime agreed to negotiate an agreement with the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1979. Janos Kadar has instituted a gradual liberalization of the Hungarian economy during the 1980s.
This does not mean that East European communist leaders are closet Jeffersonian democrats who can hardly wait to hold town meetings. But it does mean that we should not ignore the possibilities inherent in the conflicts between Soviet communists and East European communists. The key is to differentiate between those leaders who are interested in genuine reform and those who are not. We should calibrate our policies to their behavior. If an East European regime adopts more liberal policies or distances itself from Moscow, we should encourage its leaders with better economic relations with the West, which their countries need so desperately.
Hungary is an excellent example. General Secretary Kadar, whom Khrushchev appointed after the Soviet invasion of 1956, has widely liberalized his country’s economy. He has not worked miracles but he has produced positive change. The Budapest I saw in 1963 could only be described as drab and dreary. When I returned in 1983 it was bright and lively—an eloquent example of what just a little freedom can do. Kadar allows Western television and radio stations to broadcast their programs unjammed into the country. It is now even possible to buy some Western newspapers in Budapest. These reforms have greatly improved the quality of life for the Hungarian people—and they create the basis for future governments to adopt still more reforms on a pragmatic basis. We must welcome such positive change because we have a stake in its success. We should never adopt policies—such as wholesale isolation of the Eastern bloc—which would abort them at the outset.
Our strategy for peaceful competition in Eastern Europe must be grounded in pragmatism. It is not an all-or-nothing venture. Like Lenin, we must be willing to adopt a strategy of taking two steps forward and one step back. Some East European countries have already made significant progress. Each wave of reform consolidates previous reforms and opens the way for still more in the future. In the early 1950s, the great issue in Poland was whether the Kremlin could force its clients in Warsaw to collectivize agriculture. Poland held Moscow off. Today, after successive waves of peaceful change, the issue of land ownership is not even subject to debate. Solidarity expanded the frontiers of freedom to an unprecedented extent. Even through the imposition of martial law, the Polish government failed to restore the previous status quo. Warsaw has had to accept the existence of thousands of independent publications. With the Solidarity leadership still active, it has even had to accommodate itself to a de-facto organized political opposition. Stalin must be twirling his mustache in his grave.
Promoting such peaceful change is how we can compete with Moscow in Eastern Europe. Maintaining control over these countries will be a perpetual problem for the Kremlin. Freedom is an acquired taste. Unlike the Russians, East Europeans have tasted freedom in the past—and they still have a taste for it. How far peaceful change can carry the countries of Eastern Europe toward genuine independence and internal freedom is an open question. We must not render that question moot by failing to do what we can to promote it.
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p; We should also extend this peaceful competition into the Soviet Union itself. To many Americans, this sounds like a kind of hostile act. But it is not. Soviet commentators now regularly appear on American news broadcasts, peddling the Soviet line on international issues. The United States must not refrain from beaming news and information into the Soviet Union. We have every right to do so under international law, and we should exercise this right. If we adopt a policy of unilateral restraint in the war of ideas, we will forfeit one of our most effective tools in the American–Soviet competition.
Our goal should be to encourage the decentralization of power in the Soviet Union. That must be a long-term goal—but it is within reach. While Kremlin leaders hold thousands of political prisoners, the era of Stalinist mass terror has ended. Without terror, Moscow simply cannot exert the same kind of total control. This has loosened up the system and has opened up far greater opportunities for individuals and groups to deviate from the edicts of the central government. Our broadcasts into the Soviet Union should promote a gradual push on the part of the Soviet peoples to lessen control by Kremlin leaders.
There are those who argue that such reform is impossible in a totalitarian power like the Soviet Union. They are wrong. While change comes at an excruciatingly slow pace, it does occur—and we must seek to affect the direction it takes.
Radio Liberty is a good beginning. But our broadcasts must direct far greater attention to the non-Russian nations of the Soviet Union. Moscow rules the last multinational empire on earth. Russians constitute barely half the total population. The other half includes Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Byelorussians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Moldavians, Tadzhiks, Lithuanians, Turkomens, Kirghiz, and dozens of others. There are over one hundred distinct nations in the Soviet Union. Our radio broadcasts should address these peoples in their native languages and should provide them with information about their own regions and histories which the Russian-dominated government refuses to disseminate.
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