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divisions, moreover, would be lost
to the Warsaw Pact's forward
defense structure. Worst of all,
civil insurrection in Poland would
leave Moscow's most strategic
buffer state of all, East Germany,
virtual ly isolated on the western
perimeter.
Military intervention, more–
over would seriously cripple the
Soviet war effort in Afghanistan ,
which has become bogged down.
Defenses along the Soviet
Union's 7,000 mile, often-tense
border with a rch rival China,
would suffer cutbacks.
The Pollsh Burden
The Kremlin knows full well that
a military move would likely
mean the complete collapse of the
Polish economy, whose chronic
weakness led to the labor unrest
in the first place Iast summer.
Militant labor leaders have
warned Moscow that Russian sol–
diers might be able to force Pol–
ish workers back to the factories,
mines and shipyards-but they
couldn't make them work.
Soviet leaders have agonized
over the grim prospects of having
to assume, under occupation con–
ditions, the burden of helping feed
Poland's thirty-five million people.
The U.S.S.R. has suffered
through two bad harvests, Poland
three.
1
n the aftermath ofinterven–
tion, Poland's prívate farmers–
who comp,rise eighty percent of
that country's farm force-would
probably stop producing for the
urban areas, gravely compounding
the food shortages.
Moscow would also have to
assume the burden of Poland's
enormous debt to Western banks,
now $23 billion. (The sum is so
huge that Polish exports barely
pay the yearly interest due on
these loans. After an intervention,
production of key export items,
such as coal and ships, would be
seriously impaired.)
Lastly, NATO member coun–
tries quickly warned Moscow of
grave repercussions to be ex–
pected in the wake of marching
orders into Poland. At stake, they
warned, was the Soviet Union's
6
confirmed access to Western
grain supplies as well as a full
array of advanced technology.
Moscow's Securlty Concerns
All in all, Moscow was con–
fronted with a dilemma that
promised, as 1981 began, to Iook
like a nearly hopeless situation.
Intervention would mean incal–
culable bloodshed and grave eco–
nomic setbacks for both Poland
and the Soviet Union. But not to
intervene might only insure the
gradual slipping away of nearly
its entire buffer zone in Central
and Eastern Europe.
ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST ministers
to striking Polish shipbuilders during
labor unrest in port city of Gdansk in the
summer of 1980.
Above all else, the Soviets are
concerned over their Westero
defensive line. Moscow carne out
of World War 11 having lost twen–
ty mmion people, and demanding
protection against any possible
reviva! of fascism. It seized that
protection for itself in tbe form of
the military occupation of the east–
ern part of Germany. Seizure of
the war-ravaged states of Eastern
Europe completed the
cordon san–
itaire
against an invasion from the
West.
"As long as a Soviet army si ts
on the East GermaPs," notes
Joseph C. Hatsch of the
Chris–
tian Science Monitor,
"Moscow
can feel secure against a German
revival." But that Soviet position,
Mr. Hatsch observes, would dis–
appear if Moscow lost control of
Poland. That would automatically
and inevitably lead to the even–
tual loss by Moscow of control
over East Germany, Czechoslo–
vakia and Hungary.
"There would then be nothing
Jeft" adds Mr. Hatsch, "of what
the men of Moscow regard as
tbeir just compensation for the
enormous losses they suffered
during World War Il. "
Conftlcting Nationalisms
Clearly, the challenge to the Iead–
ership of the Soviet Union is how
to preserve its interests in Central
and Eastern Europe while at the
same time diffusing political
unrest that threatens to have the
Red Army intervening time and
again. Is there another way, the
Kremlin must surely be tbinking.
After thirty-five years of
Soviet-imposed communism, the
national self-identities of the
Eastern European states have
simply refused to be submerged.
E
In the dark Stalinist period of the
!
late 1940s the U.S.S.R. tried to
1
suppress the individual national–
~
isms. But it has long since given
~
up trying to recast its once total–
~
ly-subservient satellites in a
made-in-Moscow mold.
The nations of Eastern Europe
are not only different from the
peoples of the Soviet Union, they
vary greatly from each other.
They range from the Germans in
the north, through various fami–
lies of the Slavic race, to the
Magyars in Hungary and the
Romanians in the southeast. As
tbeir very name attests, the
Romanians, in Ianguage and cul–
ture, are inheritors of the cultural
traditions of Western Europe.
Moscow has had to tolerate
these national differences and
accommodate a wide range of
approaches to communism. Hun–
gary, for example, practices what
the Soviets derisively call "gou–
lash .communism," a mixture of
state enterprises coupled with a
small-scale prívate enterprise. As
a result, Soviet tourists come in
(Continued on page 43)
The PLAIN TRUTH