Tightening Up the Communist Bloc

For the Communist leaders of Eastern Europe, the conciliatory Ostpolitik of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt is laden with peril as well as promise. Brandt's offer of closer ties promises to bring Eastern European nations considerable economic benefits. But conciliation withBonn has already robbed the Communist regimes of the propaganda argument among their own people: that only Communism and Soviet power offer protectionfrom "revenge-seeking" West Germans. Relaxation of East-West tensions might also expose Eastern Europeans to Western influences that could make them far more dissatisfied with their own rigid social and political order and more eager for Western-style consumer goods.

Even so, the Soviets have made a historic decision in favor of better relations with the West--and Bonn in particular. Eastern European leaders have little choice but to respond favorably to Brandt's overtures.Now, in anticipation of the increasing danger of cultural and political inroads, the East bloc regimes are trying to tighten internal discipline and stamp out the last remnants of a preCommunist society. Two examples:

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

In the four years since Russian tanks crushed Alexander Dubcek's experimental "socialism with a human face," predominantly Roman Catholic Czechoslovakia has undergone a national religious revival--perhaps in reaction to the imposition of Soviet-style repression. The number of baptisms, church weddings, church funerals and applications to seminaries has been steadily rising, and more and more citizens are giving their children religious instruction. Lately, the Soviet-installed regime of Gustav Husak has responded to the trend with a concerted anti-church campaign of discrimination, propaganda and outright repression.

In a series of measures aimed directly against the church, the Husak government has ordered all priests to retire at the age of 60, forced younger priests to move from the cities to remote country parishes and severely restricted attendance at seminaries. The students and teachers at the Bratislava Faculty of Theology recently went on a hunger strike when 50 out of 80 candidates for admission were rejected on the orders of the Ministry of Culture.

State educational officials have let it be known that attendance at religious classes will be counted against youths who want to enter Czechoslovakia's overcrowded universities. The Czechoslovak press has launched an all-out attack on religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the most heavily Catholic region, the Communist Party organ Pravda warned readers that religion causes schizophrenia, leads to mental imbalance and encourages crime. The national army paper Obrana Lidu denounced the Vatican as the world's "greatest center of ideological subversion."

Ever since 1950, the Communist government in Prague has steadfastly refused to let the Vatican appoint bishops in Czechoslovakia. The Dubcek regime opened negotiations with the Holy See in 1968, but they were abruptly suspended after the Soviet invasion and Dubcek's fall. Since then, the country's prelates have been dying off without being replaced. The death of two Czechoslovak bishops last month leaves only one of the country's twelve dioceses in the hands of a Vatican appointee.

EAST GERMANY

Despite its political orthodoxy, East Germany has long tolerated one of the Communist world's greatest anomalies. Some 8,800 small businesses were until recently either privately owned or run by entrepreneurs in partnership with the state. They employed 15% of the country's labor force and accounted for roughly 14% of its $40 billion annual industrial output, including the high-quality exports--textiles, glassware, optical equipment--that have given East Germany a foothold in lucrative Western markets. Such free enterprise increased the earning power of many East German workers and gave their capitalist bosses the good life of fat incomes, big cars, yachts and summer houses along the Baltic.

Now the Gemuetlichkeit is over. Under hard-lining Party Boss Erich Honecker, the East German regime mounted a headlong drive to eradicate what Karl Marx called "the birthmarks of the old society." Last week Herbert Warnke, chairman of the East German Trade Unions Federation, announced that the "socialization of the private sector" has been completed.

Most of the firms affected are in the areas of construction, services and consumer goods. Though they are generally small outfits, with an average of 25 to 50 employees, a few have as many as 1,000 workers on the payroll and upwards of $30 million a year in gross revenues. By midsummer, only inns, small retail operations and one-man repair shops will be outside state ownership and control.

Among the larger casualties has been the internationally known fashion house of Magdeburg Designer Heinz Bormann, the "Red Dior." His firm's new name: the Magdeburg People's Factory of Women's Fashions. None of the small entrepreneurs have been literally forced to sell to the state; nationalization has been accomplished by making it virtually impossible for private firms to hang on. Taxes have been raised 10%, surcharges have been slapped on raw materials and supplies, and owners have been barred from turning their businesses over to their children.

Those who do not decide to sell "voluntarily" are summoned to "persuasion talks" with party officials or confronted by a "spontaneous" employee resolution supporting nationalization. Compensation is low, and it is deposited in blocked bank accounts to be doled out at a rate averaging about $940 a year. When owners die--and most of them are old--the remaining funds revert to the state.

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