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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 24, 1984
limits. He has no intention of being the next Imre Nagy (Hun
gary), Alexander Dubcek (Czechoslovakia) or Wladislaw Gomulka
(Poland).
Honecker can count the 20 Soviet divisions in his
country as well as anyone.
And in the past he has sung the
Kremlin's tune whenever required to do so.
Yet he knows that there is a complex politics within the Soviet
empire, of which even Moscow must take some account•... There is
awareness that the Soviet style of reacting to challenge has
changed over the years. In Budapest (1956) the Red Army invaded
by itself, in Prague (1968) other Warsaw Pact armies provided
cover, and in Warsaw {1981) Moscow induced the Poles to invade
themselves. Recently the Soviets stood by as the Polish govern
ment provided amnesty to Solidarity leaders.
The Soviets are deeply disturbed by the defiance displayed by the East Ger
mans. They are smarting under what might be called the "Rodney Dangerfield
syndrome"--"I don't get no respect." NEW YORK TIMES correspondent Serge
Schmemann writes from Moscow in his paper's August 6 edition:
What has aroused the Kremlin's anger•.•, diplomats believe, is
more the timing of the initiatives, their independence of Moscow
and the fact that it is Germans who dare defy
their
Soviet con
querors [rather than Poles) •...
Soviet leaders are for the most part old men who remember the
war.
They sustain fear of a revived Third Reich and abiding
taste for their role of wartime victor. World War II, the Great
Patriotic War as the Russians call it, has become something of a
national legend to Soviet Communism, with the Soviet role in the
war swelling to superhuman proportions.
The vexed commentaries by Soviet authorities in June during the
Allies' celebration of the 1944 Normandy invasion underscored the
sensitivity of Soviet leaders to deviations from their version of
the war. As they perceived the commemoration, it was an attempt
to belittle the Russians' suffering and victories. In this con
text, independent moves toward better relations between the Ger
manys must look to Moscow like "revanchist" yearnings, lacking in
the penitent deference expected of an aggressor nation that was
defeated.
Chancellor Kohl has long irked the Russians on this score. On
his first state visit to Moscow last year, he publicly rejected
the charge of revanchism, asking Mr. Andropov to his face how he
would act if Moscow and the Soviet Union were divided.
In the August 20 WALL STREET JOURNAL, Roger Thurow writes that the "German
Question" remains an unsettling one for powers in both Eastern and Western
Europe.
"Closed," said Hans Apel, a former defense minister who is running for
mayor of West Berlin: "The question is no longer open." It is useless,
he said, to talk about German reunification in a national sense; it
can only happen through the larger reunification of Europe••..