Facing East and West

MORE than anything else, this was the year of the Anniversary in Eastern Europe. The celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism--always accompanied by fervent expressions of undying gratitude to the Soviet liberators--dominated city squares, billboards and television screens in every remote part of every Warsaw Pact country. On Czechoslovakia, the celebration had a distinctly hollow ring, the presence of Soviet troops in the country since 1968 kind of putting a damper on things. But in Poland and Romania as well, a lot of people I spoke with this summer seemed to find the "Eternal Brotherhood With the Soviet Union" propaganda approach somewhat heavyhanded. A Polish student in Gdansk (known in history books as Danzig) told me a joke that is currently making the rounds among his friends. An orange is rolling on the Polish-Soviet border, and two border guards, one Russian and one Polish, find it simultaneously. The Pole claims that it is on the Polish side of the border, therefore his; the Russian insists that the opposite is true. The two are pretty much at a loss for what to do, when finally the Russian has an idea. "In the spirit of brotherhood between our two countries," he says, "let's divide the orange like brothers." Shaking his head, the Pole retorts, "No! Not like brothers--half and half."

I don't know if this story makes a political statement about relations between the Soviet Union and the people of their client states in Eastern Europe and I'm inclined to feel that it does and doesn't. Certainly in Czechoslovakia, and in Romania to a lesser extent, resentment toward the USSR runs high, but in other countries, East Germany and Poland, for example, there is more of a desire among people, particularly students, to convey a sense of awareness to the Westerner, a feeling that, as one East Berliner put it, "We're not being taken in. We have both feet on the ground." Bitterness or anger at the Russians was really absent in these cases, replaced by a cagey cynicism about global power politics.

This is not to minimize the activism and significance of dissidents in these countries--the dissident movements throughout Eastern Europe are both vital and growing. But somehow--except perhaps in Czechoslovakia, where the state seems to be the dissident force not the "dissidents"--politics, or more accurately, ideology didn't seem to matter a great deal to people. It is in this sense that the American perspective on Eastern Europe seems most distorted.

The Helsinki Conference serves as a good illustration. The conference and its attendant issues provoked public discussion by American officials about the "selling-out of the Captive Nations" and an outcry of a large segment of the American press against the European security agreement, and it also provided politicans of all stripes with a ready-made issue, when President Ford refused to receive Solzhenitsyn, but the conference just didn't seem to be of much interest to anybody in Eastern Europe. The newspapers gave it plenty of play--the text of the agreement was even printed in full--but nobody I spoke with seemed to attach any real significance to it, either positive or negative. The sense that agreements and treaties don't really affect day-to-day life is very much present.

If people are ambivalent and even apathetic in their attitudes toward the Soviet union or toward international politics, perceptions about the United States are in an entirely different realm. America appears to be a complete enigma for people in the Soviet Bloc. Among some there was a consciousness similar to that of early 20th century immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island believing the streets were paved with gold. People like this constantly interrogate the American visitor about salaries, apartment size, leisure time, and so on, not because they are faring particularly badly, but because the image of unlimited wealth and opportunity in the U.S. has yet to be dispelled. Others wonder more about sheer size--size of buildings, of cities, of airports or of cars. Still others, perhaps with a more defined political awareness, have questions about poverty, unemployment and the skid-row syndrome. Few, if any, indicate signs of envy, but there wasn't one who wasn't curious.

Even those who espouse the party line, while vociferous in their attacks on American foreign policy, were not particularly militant about American society itself. After a heated political argument, a member of the Free German Youth, the mandatory-membership national youth organization in East Germany, turned to me, and said in a voice seeking understanding. "We don't pretend to know what's best for you, but at least no one dies of hunger here any more."

AN illustration of the hard-to-define attitude toward the United States is the presence of a sort of cult around the memory of John F. Kennedy in Eastern Europe. No one person I spoke with seemed to remember him fondly for any specific reason, but in almost uncanny fashion, several Poles, Czechs, and East Germans described in vivid detail their recollections of the day Kennedy was assasinated. And somehow, even for those who know of and oppose the policies he pursued, he stands as a positive symbol, a symbol of good. Perhaps the same Kennedy phenomenon exists elsewhere--and I've been told that it does--but nonetheless it seemed to me a comment on a peculiar East European anxiousness to believe in America.

RECENT history, the memory of the devastation of the Second World War and the experience of Fascism, is imprinted on the minds of the adult generation in these countries, and they in turn pass it on to their children. Names of battle scenes and of concentration camps, and dates of events, were familiar to everyone with whom I discussed the period. Certainly the Communist parties have done their bit for rewriting history, so that reading a magazine article one might think that England and the United States were allied with Hitler. But for those who lived through it, only so much can be distorted. In a very real way the past is an important part of the present. And somehow this is much more appealing than desire to bury the past and look toward the future in, say, West Germany, where this summer a German journalist observing Henry Kissinger's personal popularity during his trip to Bonn remarked to an American colleague, "If he hadn't gone to the states, he would have become the chancellor of Germany." On a mass level, this sort of crass, unwritting forgetfulness would never be possible in Eastern Europe, though I might add that on a state level it is consciously practiced.

American spy-story stereotypes about Eastern Europe are not far from accurate. The security and police systems were as tight and pervasive as I had been led to believe they would be. The bureaucracy is massive and often impenetrable. Freedom of travel, of information, and of expression are virtually non-existent, and though in some places, Hungary and Poland for example, things seem to be improving, in others, notably Czechoslovakia, they are obviously getting worse. But nontheless, references to Captive Nations just don't seem to have much meaning in a discussion of Eastern Europe. Indeed the dialogue in America on the Helinski Conference appeared very much weighted on the side of rhetoric--compassion played a relatively minor role. The result is an American political perspective toward Eastern Europe, devoid of any understanding of the dynamics that animate the lives and attitudes of those who live in the Soviet Bloc.