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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 24, 1984
men like Chernenko simply don't inspire the terror that Stalin
used to, or even Kruschev," says Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, Director
of the Foreign Affairs Research Institute in London.
Chernenko, rumors persist, is ailing. He has not been seen in public for a
month. In the end Moscow not only has a German, but a much larger East Eu
ropean problem on its hands, observed William Pfaff in the July 29 LOS AN
GELES TIMES:
Eastern Europe.••has become a society in distinct political evo
lution•••. These countries can be said to be liberating them
selves from Soviet control, not by direct challenge but through a
deeper social evolution and by the reassertion of their national
personalities..•.
Two processes, overall, are at work. The governments themselves
experience the force of nationalism and the ambition of their in
dividual leaders. This has been a turbulent region throughout
modern history.
The "Balkan problem" was a preoccupation of
19th-century diplomacy. The Hapsburg empire had constantly to
deal with Hungarian, Czech, Polish and Serbian national feeling-
and in the end it failed and collapsed. The Soviet Union took all
of this on in 1945. It looks more and more to have been an insane
imprudence, conceivably a fatal one.
The second process is that Eastern European people themselves are
recreating how they live, indifferent to what the governments
say...• [ Lech] Walesa remarked that there now are more independ
ent publications in the country than there were in Solidarity's
heyday. There is a free intellectual life, which ignores the
Ministry of Culture and the official press and television. There
are unofficial schools and universities. The church remains the
most powerful institution in the country.
Elsewhere•••officials fear rocking the boat. But the boat isn't
seaworthy.
To change the metaphor, like the ivy that grows up
the tree but eventually smothers and destroys it, human and na
tional reality slowly but very surely is destroying what the So
viet Union has tried to create in Eastern Europe. How to deal
with this truth is the perplexing and dangerous problem history
now sets before the Soviet Union.
The official reaction of the Hungarians, Romanians and others to the Ho
necker trip should tell us more about the "political evolution" underway in
Eastern Europe.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau