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Introduction: The Freeing of Eastern Europe?
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13672 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1988 |
627 Words |
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Forty years after Joseph Stalin slammed down the Iron Curtain, transforming Eastern Europe into a Soviet zone, Mikhail Gorbachev has seemingly directed that the curtain be raised and has urged the communist regimes of Eastern Europe to adopt "glastroika"--glasnost + perestroika. While welcoming any move toward greater freedom, economic or otherwise, most Western leaders have nevertheless been asking some fundamental questions:
Is Moscow giving up some of its traditional hegemony over Eastern Europe? Given the very real differences among the various communist governments, how are they reacting to the call for new thinking and economic reform? What, if anything, should the West do to help Eastern Europe move toward modernization? In this month's Special Report, THE WORLD & I presents the answers of leading analysts in the United States and Europe.
Vladimir Sobell of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty suggests that it is appropriate to look at the Soviet-East European relationship as a loose "solar system" in which the Soviet "sun" exerts a strong gravitational pull but individual East European planets are usually able to work out their own orbits. Accordingly, the six communist regimes of Eastern Europe are responding in varying ways to the Kremlin's call for reform. Poland and Hungary were experimenting with perestroika long before Gorbachev "invented" it. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have readily adopted the "new thinking" because deviation from the Soviet line would be unthinkable. East Germany and Romania want neither glasnost nor perestroika.
To the question of whether the West should help the East modernize, Michael Marrese of
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