Western Influence Growing in East Europe

WARSAW — Across Eastern Europe, throughout the six Communist countries that have served as a buffer Tor the Soviet Union since the end of World War II, powerful currents of Western infuence are running beneath the surface of Soviet domination.

In nearly every aspect of society, in literature and music, dance and dress, even in some economic policies and political attitudes, Soviet‐style rigidity has been softened by Western fashions and ideas. This has produced for each country a different mixture of oppression and openness, censorship, and debate, Marxism

Dependence and Independence First of Three Articles and Christianity, public and private ownership — blends of East and West that have made life intellectually and materially richer for most East Europeans than for the Soviet people.

Poles and Hungarians crowd into dusky cabarets for evenings of political satire that would be unthinkable in Moscow. Offices and public reading rooms in Warsaw are strewn with the same American and West European newspapers and magazines that are regularly seized from arriving travelers by Soviet customs officials and are being kept away from ordinary people in the Soviet Union.

The opinions on world events that Rumanians and Hungarians get from their own press, and East Germans from West German television, would be strictly taboo in the Soviet Union.

Czechoslovak students can walk into downtown cafes in Prague any night of the week and listen to local bands play American jazz. In Moscow, young people must maneuver and find the right contacts to get scarce tickets to infrequent, unadvertised jazz sessions in out‐of‐theway halls.

Budapest stores carry rock records that can be bought in Moscow only at high prices on the black market, if at all. And everywhere, though to a lesser extent in Bulgaria, anyone can flip a television switch or go to a theater and watch American films that no Soviet citizen would ever see unless he has the political status or personal connections to gain entrance to closed showings.

Western fiction not yet judged fit for Soviet readers, including Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22,” Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” has been translated into Hungarian and is widely read.

Contemporary theater considered too adventurous for Soviet audiences is performed in Bucharest, Rumania. A Soviet director, Yuri Lyubimov, was able to stage an avant‐garde production based on Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in Budapest more than a year before he won permission to do so in Moscow. In Budapest, it was a franker statement relevant to contemporary society.

Governments in Eastern Europe are generally willing to spend precious hard currency on consumer goods and entertainment from the West, while the Kremlin is not. The result is that stores in most East European capitals are plentifully stocked with products unavailable to Soviet citizens, and television in Poland, Hungary and Rumania carries American series, such as “Colombo” and “Streets of San Francisco,” which are barred from the Soviet screen. Hungarian television is now broadcasting “Roots,” and teen‐ager at a Warsaw high school confided to an American, “Our real hero Kojak.”

Officials Proud of Differences

East European officials are proud of these differences, but wary of stressing them to the detriment of the Soviet Union’s image. “The Soviet attitude is, ‘You do what you want to,’” a Hungarian journalist said, “‘but don’t trumpet it around the world that you’re doing it differently. You can do anything, just don’t hit us.’”

Within the framework of loyalty to Moscow, many variations have become possible, subject to a complex chemistry of Soviet internal and foreign policy.

The readiness to absorb impressions and information from the West has been enhanced by Soviet‐American détente, which has probably had more impact in Eastern Europe than in the Soviet Union itself, and by a gradual loosening of Soviet orthodoxy at home and within the world Communist movement since the death of Stalin in 1953 and the waning of the cold war.

In a period of relatively low East‐West tension, most of these countries enjoy. broadened latitude in finding their own formulas and allowing national differences to emerge, provided that the Communist Party’s rule is assured and their military alignment remains intact to guard the Soviet border against the forces of the Atlantic alliance.

Rumania, the region’s second largest country in area and population, has broken with Moscow’s foreign policy and maintains relations with Israel and China. Hungary has abandoned the Soviet economic model by decentralizing planning and production decisions. Poland has retained considerable private enterprise in an effort to enliven the economy.

Hungary has become the freest internally, with Poland next. Both countries also have liberal travel rules, making personal contacts with the West much more extensive than anything Soviet citizens experience.

Only 3,500 people from the Soviet Union were allowed to go to the United States as tourists last year, compared with 26,000 from Poland, whose population is less than one‐seventh that of the Soviet Union. Nearly half a million Hungarians each year make private trips to Western countries, mostly in Europe.

Safety Valve of Poilitical Satire

Even under stricter East European regimes, the spirit of oppression reaches fess deeply into society than in the Soviet Union. East Germany permits the safety valve of mild political satire in nightclubs. Czechoslovaks, under tight control since the Soviet‐led invasion of 1968, still make anti‐Government and anti‐Soviet remarks in public places.

Bulgarian authorities permit no dissent, but “the overall atmosphere is lighter and freer than in Moscow,” a Western diplomat observed. In Moscow, a dissident is a pariah, usually shunned by others. But in Rumania, a historian who had been jailed briefly on treason charges, then released after pleas by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the White House security adviser, was warmly greeted by two former colleagues, both party members, who happened to spot him in a museum. One said merrily, “Hasn’t Brzezinski got you out of the country yet?”

Traveling into these countries from France, West Germany or the United States, a visitor is likely to find them drab, oppressive and relatively closed? But from Moscow, across the closely guarded Soviet border, it is a journey across a cultural divide, from isolation and intolerance into a more open world.

Refreshing Directness Is Found

There is a startling honesty in Eastern Europe, a refreshing directness and candor about problems and shortcomings that Russians instinctively try to hide. Even under oppressive regimes, East Europeans seem more comfortable with controversy than Russians, more eager to hear contrasting views and less fearful of debate.

English‐language teachers at a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, conduct more stimulating discussions of literature than their counterparts in Soviet, schools, where the tendency is to learn by rote rather than to analyze. In 10th‐ and 11thgrade classes visited in Bulgaria recently, pupils were being asked to think for themselves and to react individually to what they had read.

A teacher in Budapest said she encouraged her students to disagree; in one class, a debate broke out over the wisdom of heavy expenditures for space exploration when so many lived poorly on earth, a parallel to arguments heard in the United States, but never in Soviet classrooms.

At a high school in Warsaw, this correspondent was invited to spend two hours with a class of 18‐year‐olds in an unfettered exchange of ideas that ranged over sensitive subjects, a session unlike anything ever organized in dozens of visits to schools throughout the Soviet Union,

“What do you think of Russia?” the Polish students asked. They wanted honest answers, and there were nods of agreement with criticisms of curbs on individual rights.

“What do you think of the Polish Government?” one girl asked as if to invite an attack. “Do you think Poland is a satellite of the Soviet Union?” “Will the Soviet system change?” “Will Carter be re‐elected?” “Will you vote for him?” “Will U.S.‐China relations change U.S.Soviet relations?” “What is your view of the Israeli‐Egyptian peace treaty?” “How important is the strategic arms limitation treaty? Are you for it?” “What was the American reaction to the election of a Polish Pope?” “How do the Russians feel about the Pope’s visiting Poland in June?”

More Visited West Than Soviet

When the students were asked whether any of them wanted to study in Moscow, there were some wrinkled noses. More of them had visited the West than the Soviet Union. There was sympathetic laughter when the reporter told them how much time he spent in his Moscow office reading dispatches circulated by Tass, the Soviet Government’s press agency.

To a question of whether the Soviet Union had negative influence over Poland, a few heads nodded affirmatively, and one boy cited the censored press and television, calling it uninteresting and one‐sided, a remark no Soviet student would have dared make in front of a teacher.

Toward the end, a girl asked the ultimate question: “Would you rather live in a socialist country or in the United States?”

“In the United States. How about you?”

She hesitated only for an instant, her face intense. There would have been no doubt in Moscow about the required answer. But Warsaw is not Moscow.

Caught Between Two Worlds

“I don’t know,” she said. The words were spoken with conviction, as a ringing declaration. They brought no shocked gasps from the others, no blinks of disbelief, as if it were completely natural to say that you don’t know which world you belong in.

Perhaps inadvertently, the girl in the high school classroom had touched something essential about the peoples of Eastern Europe. Caught between two worlds, they are responsive both to their own deep Western traditions and to the political and military realities of Soviet domination, tugged this way and that by clashes of attitude that have not merely been imposed on them, but have become their own internal conflicts of impulse and emotion.

The election of Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Poland as Pope John Paul II has heightened a basic Westward orientation in Poland, where Roman Catholicism remains the leading moral force, often in uneasy competition with the Communists.

The Government press printed negative assessments of the Pope’s visit to Mexico, and Catholic prelates reportedly complained. Some priests in the south have also allowed churches to be used for lectures of the “flying university,” the unofficial movement of professors determined to say what they are barred from saying in regular classes.

The church in Czechoslovakia has also been reported stiffening its resistance to Government pressure since the Pope’s election, refusing to transfer recalcitrant priests out of Prague. The Hungarian Government has recently agreed for the first time since the end of World War II to allow young seminarians to study for the priesthood in Rome.

Relations between the church and the party seem more relaxed in most of Eastern Europe than in the Soviet Union, where young people are often pressured to stay away from church services.

In Hungary, a university lecturer told students that there were more practicing Catholics in the country than party members. At the entrance to Budapest’s Matyas Cathedral, anyone can buy crucifixes, religious medallions and statuettes and portraits of Mary and Jesus, items that can only be smuggled to Russians.

Even the Bulgarian Government, which is ideologically closest to Moscow, has issued postage stamps of religious icons. In Sofia’s Cathedral of St. Aleksandr Nevsky, built in memory of the 200,000 Russian soldiers killed in 1877‐78 while freeing Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire, young and old gather for Orthodox services. Classes of schoolchildren admire the architecture while an aged, white‐bearded priest in golden robes ladles wine from a goblet into the mouths of those taking communion

Access to U.S. Embassy Libraries

Most East European Governments are equally relaxed about citizens’ access to American Embassy libraries, where they read newspapers, books and magazines. While Soviet policemen regularly bar unauthorized people from the embassy in Moscow, Bulgarians and Rumanians walk past the guards in their capitals with only occasional incidents. In Prague, where policemen are stationed not at the embassy door but across the street, American officials estimate that 2,000 Czechoslovaks visit the library monthly.

The controlled press and radio present a checkered picture. Neither Rumania nor Hungary jams the anti‐Communist broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, the American station based in Munich, and Poland does so only intermittently.

Most of the East European press relies heavily on the output of Tass, the Soviet press agency, and Bulgarian television devotes Friday evenings to excerpts from Soviet television, in Russian.

Rumania’s broadcasts are less polemical, a reflection of its independent foreign policy. Although Hungarian television news was denounced by one local journalist as painting “too rosy a picture of Hungary,” the newspapers usually avoid Tass, sometimes using items from Western news services.

Since 1976, Hungarian television has also run a panel discussion a few times a year in which Western journalists, as well as those from Hungary and the Soviet Union, give their views on foreign affairs.

Participants are often asked beforehand to avoid sensitive subjects, such as the works of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the exiled writer who chronicled life in Soviet prison camps, but the program still exposes Hungarians to a wide range of opinion. Routines from Budapest’s political cabarets also reach television screens. One broadcast included an impersonation of Janos Kadar, the Hungarian leader. In Poland, authorities keep cabaret satire off the air, but the jokes circulate by word of mouth.

Warsaw is not Moscow. In the basement of a building on Nowy Swiat, across from the party’s Central Committee building — sardonically dubbed the White House because it was once white — and down the street from the censors’ headquarters, a well‐dressed, evidently wellconnected crowd of about 150 jammed into a small rectangular room for an evening of political irreverence.

Cabaret Tickets Hard to Get

This was the cabaret Pod Egida, meaning “under the sponsorship of … ” where those able to get tickets two months in advance sat around red‐covered tables drinking glasses of coffee, dry rea wine and orange soda, and laughing until they ached as comedians took shots at the propagandistic press, the limping economy and other convenient targets.

“I advise you not to read the foreign news page,” a comedian declared, reciting the familiar litany of Western ills portrayed by the Communist press: crime, corruption, inflation, unemployment.

“Cyclones, earthquakes, then flood and droughts, there’s nothing in between, either a flood or a drought,” he said. “If we have 10 degrees below zero, then it’s 20 below in the West.”

“If you’re sensitive, you get anxious and nervous. I advise you to read only internal news. Here we have no problems. The plan has been overfulfilled. The workers have finished building an apartment house! Oh yes, we have one problem. We don’t have enough Bulgarian films.”

Needling of the Nation’s Leaders

As a general rule, any comic who wants to needle the leadership had better do so with all the directness of a man picking his way through a minefield.

“I am standing here making a fool of myself, and they pay me for that,” one actor remarked. “Other people stand up and make fools of themselves, but they pay them for something else.” Delighted guffaws.

“If you exceed the export plan,” another actor told factory workers, “you’ll go on a trip to the West. But for not exceeding the plan, we’ll send you on a trip to our eastern friend.” Hilarity.

As in all good comedy, the long evening at Pod Egida had an undercurrent of seriousness. A young man with a guitar sang a few of his own songs, one a bitter tune about civilizations ready for death, another a melancholy vignette that went something like this:

It’s not so bad in our nursery.

We have a lot of toys, we play around.

The teacher looks after us. It’s not so bad in our nursery.

If we are not good, they slap us on our bottoms, they hit us on our hands.

It is such a nice world outside, it would he nicer if the teacher wouldn’t force us to play train.

She really doesn’t even know where to go.

We run after her and fall.

There are only a couple of us left in line.

“Whyaren’t you playing, you runt?”

“But I lust fell out of the train.”

My eyes are full of tears. I lust sit in the cor.

But then we are all playing again.

It’s not so bad in our nursery.

The audience was stilled by another of theyoung man’s songs:

You are sitting in the darkness,

lam sitting on the stage in the lights.

You can see my tense face.

It is only a moment for you, it is my whole life.

It’s the face behind the curtain that bothers me.

Let’s shout for one moment in our entire life, Before we perish.

At the conclusion of the program, all seven actors and singers stood on the tiny stage, practically among the tables, and belted out a rousing moving patriotic song containing fragments of Polish history. It ended with the chorus, “Zeby Polska, zeby Polska, zeby Polska byla Polska” — “So that Poland, so that Poland, so that Poland remain Poland.”

The words gripped the crowd, and when the last note was sung and the music died, the cabaret was suspended in a long moment of silence. Then, slowly. the applause began.

“It makes you feel better,” one woman said as she stepped out into the cool night.