Have the Soviets
Lost Eastern Europe?



It seems obvious that the Soviet Union has lost its Eastern European empire. The Berlin Wall came down and popular revolutions toppled the Communist governments of Eastern Europe and installed democratic regimes.

But were these really popular revolutions? And has the Soviet Union really lost control of its former satellites?

Dr. John Lenczowski, former director of European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council, is one of a number of experts who is not so sure the Soviet Union has lost Eastern Europe. He points out that the agendas of some of the new leaders of Eastern Europe are almost identical to Gorbachev's. On January 11, 1990, he wrote:

Do we know enough to dismiss the possibility that the changes at the top of almost all of these countries may have come at the instigation of the Kremlin, and that these countries' party leaders are simply following the party line as usual, only this time, the Gorbachev line? <1>

Lenczowski was aware that in 1984 Anatoliy Golitsyn, a high-ranking defector from the KGB (the Soviet secret police) had predicted a "false liberalization" in Eastern Europe and probably in the Soviet Union, whose "spectacular" reforms would dazzle, blind and incapacitate the West. Golitsyn said these would include the "exhibition of spurious independence on the part of the regimes of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland."<2>

The false liberalization, he said, would be part of a "final, offensive phase of the long-range policy, entailing a joint struggle for the complete triumph of communism," which would be "marked by a major shift of Communist tactics in preparation for a comprehensive assault on the West."<3>

Golitsyn's warning appeared in New Lies for Old, a book published in 1984 but based on a manuscript completed in 1968. Golitsyn's statements cannot be easily discounted for two reasons.

First, Golitsyn was an expert in counterintelligence and was thoroughly familiar with the long-range Soviet plans. From 1955 to 1959 he was assigned to the KGB Institute, where he was privy to the inner workings of the KGB and intelligence operations related to overall Soviet strategy. From 1959 to 1960 he served as senior analyst in the NATO section of the KGB's Information Department while the KGB was being reorganized and a new aggressive long-range policy was being developed.

Second, most of Golitsyn's predictions came true. It is almost as if he had been reading from a script. The "script," based on Golitsyn's knowledge of Soviet strategy, sounded like pure fantasy in 1984, when a lot of Americans still thought the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire.

Golitsyn's predictions included the formation of a coalition government in Poland made up of the Communist Party, Solidarity and the Church; the return to power of Alexander Dubcek and his associates in Czechoslovakia; the inclusion of Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet government; the Soviets' condemnation of the war they had waged in Afghanistan; and the "reform" of the KGB.

Golitsyn also predicted the reunification of Germany and the "demolition of the Berlin Wall,"<4> an enduring symbol of the Cold War, at a time when no one expected it to come down. And yet it came down so suddenly. Or did it?

Harold Rood, a professor at the Center for Defense and Strategic Studies at Southwest Missouri State University, suggests that the Soviets actually may have taken steps to dismantle the wall as early as 1984. Rood says that the Soviets "started removing the anti-personnel land mines and taking automatic shotguns out of the fence along East Germany and West Germany toward the end of 1984 and the beginning of 1985."

Rood walked up and down the fence dividing East and West Germany among the watchtowers and pillboxes in 1985 and observed these changes. Now, in retrospect, he asks, "Was that the first hint that the Berlin Wall was coming down?"<5>


The Hard Evidence Surfaces


In January of 1990, when Lenczowski and others questioned whether the changes in Eastern Europe could be taken at face value, there was not much evidence to suggest that the revolutions of Eastern Europe started in the Kremlin. There were only Golitsyn's predictions and a lot of suspicious coincidences.

But on May 30, 1990, the BBC broadcast a documentary called Czech-Mate: Inside the Revolution, which revealed that the KGB and the Czech secret police jointly engineered the Czech revolution. According to a May 31, 1990 Associated Press summary of the documentary, "Secret police leaders in both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia conspired to bring down the hard-line Communist leadership in Prague because it rejected Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union."

In the documentary, John Simpson, the BBC foreign affairs editor, said that a KGB-Czech secret-police ploy ignited one of the major demonstrations that started the revolution. On November 17, 1990, a Czech student was supposedly killed during the demonstration. The documentary reported that the "student" was actually Lt. Ludek Zivcak, a member of the Czech secret police who had infiltrated the student movement, and that he was apparently not killed.

The AP summary said, "In the days that followed [the feigned death], people poured into Wenceslas Square in the heart of the capital to mourn the death and the protests grew . . . The mass protests finally brought about the downfall of hard-line President Gustav Husak's government."

The Czech "revolution" was not an isolated case. On June 14, 1990, Barrie Dunsmore, ABC's chief diplomatic correspondent, gave his assessment of the revolutions in Eastern Europe. He said that with the exception of Romania, the revolutions were instigated by Communist leaders rather than by the people. Dunsmore said that the events of Eastern Europe were to some extent "a revolution from above," which "came first of all from Mikhail Gorbachev but then from other leaders within Poland, within Czechoslovakia, within Hungary."<6>

Dunsmore said he believed that the revolution in Romania was a popular revolution. But David Funderburk, United States ambassador to Romania between 1981 and 1985, writes, "It is obvious that the shadowy hand of Gorbachev can be seen behind the developments in Romania and other East European countries."<7>

For years, Western analysts have viewed Romania as a "maverick" Communist state, which generally did not cooperate with Moscow. Funderburk, however, claims that Romania was never a maverick. "Ceausescu was not independent from Moscow," he writes; Romania and the Soviet Union collaborated "behind the scenes in terms of military maneuvers and troop transit, intelligence (KGB-Securitate) coordination and economic-trade ties."<8>

It is well known that Ceausescu did not tolerate dissent and that the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, crushed any signs of political activity hostile to the regime. Yet Ceausescu did not crush the National Salvation Front, the opposition group that eventually replaced him, even though it was formed six to eight months before the revolution.

This suggests to Funderburk that the Front "was protected and encouraged by a power such as Moscow." Supporting the thesis that some of Eastern Europe's new leaders are Gorbachev's men, Funderburk writes: "It is more than coincidental that [Ion Iliescu, the new Communist president of Romania,] . . . studied at Moscow University and served as the President of Foreign Students when Gorbachev was President of Russian Students." <9>

Romania's largest newspaper, Adevarul, which has been the voice of the ruling National Salvation Front, confirmed the essence of Funderburk's thesis. FPI International Report said that on August 23, 1990, Adevarul "backed a view that the overthrow and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December was a coup by other government officials and was not a people's revolution."<10>

The KGB started the revolution in Czechoslovakia. There is evidence that other Eastern European revolutions were orchestrated from the top. They were not "democratic"; they were closer to purges carried out under the cover of crowds. It is impossible for Mikhail Gorbachev not to have known of and approved these doings. Considering this along with Golitsyn's predictions, I can reach no other conclusion than that Gorbachev was behind the revolutions in Eastern Europe.

What was his purpose? To get rid of hard-line leaders cast in the Stalin-Brezhnev mold and to bring in so-called moderate Communist regimes that reflected his "new thinking" and image. But did Gorbachev expect the revolutions to go as far as they did? He knew that the peoples of Eastern Europe were dissatisfied with their Communist governments. The Kremlin strategists made an effort to direct these pent-up feelings against the "Old Guard," men like Erich Honneker in East Germany, Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.

What Gorbachev and the KGB apparently weren't aware of was the depth of the peoples' desire for freedom. Once their aspirations were unleashed, the people took the revolutions further than anyone in the Soviet hierarchy had anticipated.


Control from Behind the Scenes


When Gorbachev set in motion the events that led to the Eastern European revolutions, he never intended to free the nations from Moscow's control. Despite cosmetic changes at the top, Moscow-aligned Communists still control the essential sectors of society.

Ted Koppel observed on "Nightline," "Perhaps the reason that it all seemed too easy and too good to be true is that it was. After 45 years of Communist control throughout Eastern Europe, it may have been expecting too much to believe that the Communist infrastructure would just collapse and go away."<11>

Since the Soviets apparently started the revolutions, it is reasonable to assume that they took steps to control Eastern Europe after the revolutions were over. In the case of Bulgaria and Romania, the new methods of Soviet domination are the old methods. Although the leaders have changed, both nations are still Soviet satellites and it's business as usual.

In Romania, Gorbachev's old friend, Ion Iliescu, is in power. "What happened in Romania was a great success for Gorbachev," says James Sherr, a specialist on Soviet defense and security policy at Oxford University who is associated with the Soviet Studies Institute of Military Defense in Britain. "What happened there is pretty much what he wanted to happen everywhere else in Eastern Europe."<12>

In Bulgaria, the Communists renamed their party the "Socialists" and won the first free elections in 40 years. Anti-government forces say the election was rigged; the government says the election was fair. In any case, Communists friendly to Moscow are in power.

But the other revolutions seem to have gotten out of control. The new Czechoslovakian president, Vaclav Havel, a playwright and former dissident, is no Iliescu. And in East Germany, Hungary and Poland as well, the Communists no longer hold the top positions in government.

Nevertheless, in each of these nations Communists loyal to or controlled by Moscow still control the instruments of coercive power: the military, the secret police, the intelligence services and the courts.

Intelligence and defense experts say that even where the Communists don't control the top leadership positions, they control the government bureaucracies. For example, U.S. News and World Report noted on September 10, 1990, that Poland "remains stuck with a rigged assembly, Communists in positions of influence and the general who instigated martial law in 1981 as head of state."<13>

Newsweek reported that "ten months into the Czech revolution, communist state planning remains almost intact."<14>

That gives Communists the power to frustrate the initiatives of inexperienced top officials like Havel. It also gives Communists the power to carry out their own agendas. As Sherr explains:

You've got a reverse of the situation that existed in Russia in the 1920s during the NEP [New Economic Policy] period when the Communists decided to keep control of the commanding heights but give up control of everything else in society. Now the Communists have decided to surrender control of the commanding heights, but they are still in the woodwork and under the floorboards everywhere.<15>

This phenomenon has gone largely unnoticed in Eastern Europe. But it is more noticeable in Nicaragua. On August 20, 1990, Time magazine reported that even though Violeta Chamorro is the democratically elected president of Nicaragua, the Soviet-backed Sandinistas still control the government:

After 100 days of ruling Niaragua, what power does the Violeta Chamorro government actually wield? Not much, according to State Department officials, who believe that the ousted Sandinistas still run the country. "The civilians hold the offices, but the Sandinistas have all of the muscle, and they monitor phone calls at will," says a U.S. diplomat just back from Nicaragua.

Humberto Ortega, brother of the ex-President and Chamorro's army chief, earns grudging American respect as the most politically adroit figure in the country. Chamorro gets a harsh assessment. "Even her friends call her `Rag Doll,'" says the U.S. official. "She's basically apolitical and wants Nicaragua to be a big happy family. Not surprisingly, nobody respects her. Ministers ignore the orders she signs."<16>

And that's the way it goes when a nation tries to reverse the course of a Communist takeover. Where totalitarianism is concerned, there is nothing new under the sun.