European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - January 09, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 10 the stars and stripes columns . Rosenthal soviet dissidents were True heroes of the 80s where Are their names search Tor the names of the people who built the revolution the world celebrates. Hunt for them in the masses of decade end print pouring from journalists and academics. Listen for them through the hours of to analysis of the Eastern european and soviet struggle for Freedom. 1 have not found or heard them the names of the soviet men and women who suffered in prison for so Many of their Yean for speaking the truth about what communism was doing to their country or who died because they spoke. Their words were heard first Only in Small Clandes Tine groups in the soviet Union. Then the truth they told about the communist system reached the outside world. For years most of the world did not pay much at Tention. They seemed so few and their voices so weak against the huge dictatorship surrounding them. But in Eastern Europe As Well As in the soviet Union the very existence of underground resistance in the Center of the Empire helped Light the fires and keep them alive. These men and women were the dissidents of the soviet Union. Many still Are. What a Palid word dissident for people who were willing to fight without arms against the mighty soviet Power its prisons and firing squads. Mikhail Gorbachev has written his name larger inthe 80s than anybody could have dreamt including Mikhail Gorbachev. Without his understanding that the soviet system was in need of change if it was to survive at All the rebellion could have taken years longer to come about. But the revolution in Eastern Europe now moving into the soviet Union is not being fought for the re form of communism he seeks but for its abolition. I am a communist a convinced communist he proclaimed the other Day. For some that May be a fantasy. But for me it is my main he has said the same thing before. There is no Rea son not to believe him or pretend As president Bush did at Malta that we do not hear him. That will not help persuade him to change his mind nor help the soviet people replace him if he docs not. But he could not have existed As the political Force he became if the truth about soviet communism its brutalities the imprisonment and death of millions the economic pillaging and social corruption had not been told by the dissidents year after harrowing year. Time Magazine Calls Gorbachev Man of the dec credit is due to him but the dissidents who William Safire fought communism while he tried to build it. And still do Are the real men of the decade and decades past. Here on the desk is a Black Loose Leaf Book with Page after Page of their names names and stories of the prisoners who suffered in just one political prison Camp in just one Corner of the gulag that i was permitted to visit on a december Day one year ago. It would take a huge Library to hold All the names fall the captives in All the Camps in All the Frozen Cor ners through the decades. Most of them arc free now those who did not die. Most not All. There arc still men in the Camps serving Long sentences for saying the things Gorbachev says himself or for trying to leave their own countries a crime no longer a crime or for talking with Ameri can diplomats in the Days when that was treason. Nobody outside the secret police knows How Many still Are in the political cells. The International league of human rights estimates 300. But each one is a living reproach to Gorbachev and All of us who forget them. Some of the men and women once caged in soviet political prisons were teachers and poets. But at least As Many were boilermakers carpenters and farm some of them arc too weary to do More than just live Happ of be beyond the barbed wire. But most of them keep fighting to push the boundaries of Freedom further and wider with their speeches and pamphlets and demonstrations. Most of All the fight for what Gorbachev will not give them the end of the communist political monopoly and eventually the end of All communist political of them see Gorbachev As their destined enemy. Others believe that he is too Wise knows too Well that the soviet system is going under to allow himself to be washed away in the flood. But in either Case the dissidents arc already on his tory s cover of the 1980s. And they will still be right there in 1999, with one More Brave decade adding burnish to their names. C me York times Gorbachev must Deal with 2 different worlds the cold War is Over the free world won and the evil Empire lost let s pick a Date for pc Day and celebrate the history ending Victory Over so say our triumphalist. The cold War is Over it was largely our uptight right wingers fault to begin with because the russians were never so say our sore win ners. Gorb philes and Gorbo phones Are on All fours in the same mindset it Sall Over but the Happy distribution of the peace dividend. A ragtag band taking exception to this consensus is derided by both sides As unreconstructed cold warriors skunks at the Garden party of the nifty 90s. From Moscow Brezhnev Vite retreads accuse us of howling be cause we were deprived cold Turkey of our beloved communist enemy. dissenters from the widespread wow be worldview have been reduced to Yogi Berra geopolitics the cold War Ain t Over till it s we mutter that Gorbachev is motivated Only by the threat of incipient col lapse not by an interest in abandon ing Iron control. We warn that As Soontas the West ameliorates the economic pain the necessity for glasnost an free Enterprise will Lessen and the totalitarian system will survive. Now in the Nick of time come substantial intellectual underpinning for the Don to save communism gang. The american Academy of arts an sciences is based in Cambridge mass., not exactly a reactionary redoubt. The Academy publishes a quarterly. Dae Dalus named after the athenian who built an ingenious labyrinth. An article will appear in that review tilled to the Stalin mausoleum play on Edmund Wilson s to the Fin land station about Lenin and signed by a a pseudonym recalling the a used by George Kennan a lifetime ago in suggesting a policy of containment. Z surveys the 70 years leading to the political graveyard in a Way that illuminates this past decade s events. Awareness of looming disaster began in Yuri Andropov s Kab the Novosibirsk report by the sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya in 1983 implied the necessity of Radical restructuring for sheer survival its leaking first alerted the world to the impending end of soviet Gorbachev was Andropov redux and at first tried to revitalize the communist party when that failed he built a parallel Appart reminiscent mutates Mut Andis of the Way Stalin had used the a kid against the mainline recent elections held to in sure Gorbachev against Khrushchev s Fate of removal by the Central com Mittee had an unintended result to produce a resounding defeat not jus for the Appart As Gorbachev wished but for the party As an institution the party which had hitherto inspired fear in the people suddenly came to fear the but the people s interests arc not being served by the communist party or Gorbachev s parallel soviet St Appa rat private cooperatives were corrupted by the local political mafias and decentralization was subverted be cause it threatened the party s monopoly of Power. Result Gorbachev is left with the worst of two possible worlds an old one that refused to die and a new one without the strength to be Gorbachev trying to be both Luther and the Pope cannot fix the stultifying system without going much further than he says he is willing or Able to , warns z an ideological soulmate whose identity i have no need to know decaying superpowers do not go quietly into the in the historical epoch aborting Don t join the crowd expecting serenity or preaching stability. And Don t Start spending that peace dividend As Tocqueville observed in z s keynote the most dangerous time for a bad govern ment is when it starts to Reform itself. C n Yort Tim the opinions expressed in the columns and cartoons on this Page represent those of the authors and Are in no Way to reconsidered As representing the flows of the stars and stripes or the United states government
