Eastern Europe: Stirrings

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EASTERN EUROPE

No one in Washington talks any more about "rolling back" Communism in Eastern Europe. Now the hope is to "loosen it up." The U.S. expects the test ban treaty, and whatever cold war relaxation that may follow, to help weaken the satellites' dependence on Moscow and to turn them increasingly toward the West. The Eastern European countries are of course still solidly Communist, and their leaders keep warning that "peaceful coexistence" does not apply to the war with Western ideology. The loudest warnings are from East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, who rules by repressive methods that Khrushchev himself has abandoned. But elsewhere, there are stirrings and signs of change:

∙ HUNGARY is hospitable to Western in fluence, as long as it does not offend its rulers by being openly antiCommunist. Budapest's relatively relaxed ways are largely the result of efforts by Premier Janos Kadar to erase the bloody stains of 1956, when he personally called in Soviet tanks to crush the revolution. Finding that a lighter yoke yields greater economic prosperity and less political opposition, he has given key managerial jobs to nonparty technicians—and fired inefficient Red bureaucrats. In Budapest coffeehouses the twist has given way to the bossa nova and the Madison. Restrictions against travel have been lifted; last year 6,000 Hungarians were allowed to take trips to the West, a 400% increase over 1961, even though the frontier with Austria is still studded with minefields.

Kadar's "respectability" finally won the regime an unchallenged seat at the United Nations. Last week from Rome, Pope Paul VI sent a message to Hungarian bishops announcing the expectation of "good news," a hint that Josef Cardinal Mindszenty may soon be allowed by the Reds to leave the U.S. legation, where he has been holed up for almost seven years under 24-hour watch by Budapest police. After the revolution of 1848 swept the Continent, Hungarian Patriot Lajos Kossuth said that many people thought his countrymen were the "reddest republicans in Europe." Today, Hungary's people are fast becoming Europe's most republican Reds.