Forgotten But Not Gone

By Susan Tifft

Many East Europeans watched the dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party last week with a sense of deja vu. Although it has been almost a year since the last Soviet bloc nation was ruled by a communist monolith (Bulgaria in December), traces of the party still lace everyday life in most former satellites.

Few countries have followed the example of Germany, where communist cadres were thoroughly purged following unification. A former senior Central Committee member was reduced to washing dishes at Berlin's Grand Hotel. Lower- ranking staff fared no better. A handful of interpreters and administrators aside, East Germany's entire 2,500-member diplomatic corps was fired.

Germany could afford such a housecleaning because it has skilled noncommunists from the former West Germany to fill critical jobs. But other East European nations need the expertise of old bureaucrats and so are more tolerant of past party ties. In 1989 Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel appointed Josef Tosovsky, an apparatchik whose star rose under communist rule, to be president of his country's state bank. Other ex-functionaries have found comfortable posts outside the power structure. Jerzy Urban, who ran Polish state television during the last days of the communist regime, now edits a satirical magazine that mocks postcommunist politicians.

Last week Bonn strengthened its demand for the return of former East German leader Erich Honecker, who fled to the Soviet Union in March to escape manslaughter charges arising from his shoot-to-kill orders to prevent East Germans escaping to the West. But generally there is little clamor for vengeance. Except for Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, who underwent a televised trial and execution, relatively few former communist leaders have been prosecuted, and none executed.

The end of communist domination has not meant the end of the party. Despite a mass exodus of members, it thrives in several East European countries, though always with a new name. The Bulgarian Socialist Party -- the old Communist Party with a new label -- emerged victorious in May 1990 in the country's first free parliamentary elections in 50 years. That same month, Romanian Ion Iliescu, a communist official under the hated Ceausescu, won a two-year term as interim President with a startling 85% of the vote. His party, the National Salvation Front, had shed its identity as the Communist Party only weeks earlier.

Most East European countries have gradually turned onetime monuments to communist rule to more progressive purposes. In Warsaw the massive building that once housed the party's Central Committee is now home to Poland's fledgling stock exchange, of all things. Last spring Hungary passed a law to facilitate the return of properties nationalized by the communists to their former owners. The issue is also under debate in Poland and what was East Germany. But restitution will be expensive; Hungary estimates the cost at about $1.5 billion. And the process promises to lead to a crush of legal disputes as successive owners lay claim to the same piece of property. In the end, disentangling the Communist Party from its assets could prove to be far more difficult than mounting the revolutions that toppled its leaders.

With reporting by James Graff/Zagreb and James O. Jackson/Bonn