Eastern Europe: Worried and Nervous

East Europeans use political humor to stay sane. A joke now making the rounds in coffeehouses and parlors involves a meeting of East bloc leaders to decide how to react to Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness. Recalling the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia to stop reforms, they announce that Warsaw Pact troops are invading the Soviet Union to crush the threat to Communism posed by the radical Gorbachev regime.

If the people are laughing, many of the aging leaders of Moscow's East European satellite states are not. Most appear concerned about Gorbachev's program of economic and political reforms -- and with good reason. They realize that copying the Soviet policies would effectively repudiate their own. The men who control the six Warsaw Pact countries remember the last time such wrenching change took place in the Kremlin. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin, unrest swept Eastern Europe. Workers rioted in Poland, and a Hungarian rebellion had to be put down by Soviet troops. Notes one Polish journalist: "Everyone just holds his breath and waits for what will happen next."

The strongest reaction to the Gorbachev moves has come in Czechoslovakia. Since Soviet troops marched into that country in 1968 to stamp out the short- lived Prague spring of liberalization, the regime of Gustav Husak, 74, has pursued policies of stolid central planning coupled with rigid political control. Now, encouraged by Gorbachev's words, reformers within the Communist Party appear to have begun a campaign against conservatives. In the process they have encouraged some public support. GORBACHEV can be seen scrawled on a number of Prague walls, and in Pilsen and Bratislava last month small groups of people waved banners declaring WE WANT GORBACHEV.

Czechoslovakia's Premier Lubomir Strougal, a longtime advocate of reform, has taken the lead in attacking orthodoxy in what Western diplomats believe is shaping up as a power struggle. Strougal recently denounced the economic policies of the Husak years, saying, "The reforms of 1968 were politically misused . . . but after that, our economy was managed with the methods of the 1950s."

East Germany has been very cool to glasnost. Party Leader Erich Honecker, 74, in a major speech last month all but ignored Gorbachev's program and noted in passing that "there are different ways of proceeding among Communist states." Honecker is so concerned about Gorbachev's reforms that the East German media have been censoring the Soviet leader's speeches. As a result, East Germans now have to tune in West German television to get full reports on Gorbachev's proposals. Honecker, though, may avoid immediate problems with Moscow because of his country's solid economic performance. "From the Soviets' point of view, East Germany is efficient, disciplined and relatively prosperous," says one Western analyst in Munich. "That's a position the Soviet Union can only envy." By contrast, Gorbachev has already chastised Bulgaria and its troubled economy. After visiting Sofia in late 1985, the Soviet leader said there were "sharp edges" to his meeting with Bulgarian Leader Todor Zhivkov. Zhivkov has since pressed, with minimal success, for economic reforms like the decentralization of economic power to factory managers.