Communism Gusts of Dissatisfaction

By William R. Doerner

In the wake of one of the worst outbreaks of ethnic violence in modern Soviet history, Mikhail Gorbachev last week moved to confront the crisis in a safely bureaucratic manner. A high-level investigation will be launched to resolve grievances between the neighboring southern republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan that resulted in confrontations claiming at least 34 lives. At the same time, Gorbachev said, any solution must be based on "internationalist" principles. Most Soviet analysts took that remark as a coded warning to Armenians to set aside their nationalist aspirations, specifically, the goal of annexing the Nagorno-Karabakh district of Azerbaijan, which is populated mainly by Armenians and was the scene of most of the unrest. Whether that stipulation is agreeable to Armenia is questionable, but no further disturbances were reported in the region.

Soviet problems with ethnic unrest will doubtless be very much on Gorbachev's mind this week, when he is scheduled to make a five-day visit to Yugoslavia, a nation with some of Eastern Europe's bitterest tribal rivalries. Yet even as the Soviet leader was seeking to keep the lid on at home, outbreaks of turbulence erupted in three of the Soviet-dominated states of Eastern Europe. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, Communist authorities last week moved to stamp out separate shows of popular defiance. Though these outbreaks involved political rather than ethnic grievances, both forms of unrest may have been prompted in part by the spirit of political openness and reform that Gorbachev has promoted.

The outbreak in Poland was mounted by students at the universities of Warsaw and Cracow marking the anniversary of a wave of antigovernment protest that swept the country in 1968. In both cities, several thousand people gathered downtown and demanded official recognition of the Independent Students' Union, banned when martial law was imposed in 1981. The Warsaw crowd was charged by hundreds of ZOMO riot police, who used three-foot truncheons to club demonstrators. In Cracow, several dozen students were reported injured, and more than 100 were detained.

Czechoslovakia's hard-line regime was confronted with a peaceful but highly unusual protest over the country's repression of religious freedoms. To make their point, 10,000 Roman Catholics gathered at St. Vitus' Cathedral in Prague's Hradcany district for a special Mass celebrated by Primate Franticek Cardinal Tomacek, 88. Police did not interfere, but they had previously arrested 13 dissidents to prevent their participation.

In East Germany, authorities continued a campaign of harassment aimed at would-be emigrants, many of whom have sought assistance from Protestant church groups in their efforts to obtain exit visas. At least 100 such individuals have been arrested, according to church officials. Last Sunday police surrounded East Berlin's Sophienkirche, one of the city's largest churches, subjecting worshipers to intimidating identity checks. The new crackdown follows a drive in January in which some dissidents were "exiled" to West Germany as punishment. Officials have evidently decided that the sweet prospect of such punishment merely encouraged the estimated 50,000 would-be emigrants, most of them not overtly political, to become more vocal in their efforts to leave the country.

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/Vienna and Ann Blackman/Moscow