Ussr Foreign Relations Eastern Europe

Negotiations between Poland's Communist leaders and Solidarity over the new coalition government in Warsaw were at an impasse last August. The issue--how much power the Communists would have--was central to formation of the Solidarity-led coalition and its prospects for success. Resolution of the dispute was crucial, all agreed, but after more than four decades in power, the Communists were finding it difficult to accept Solidarity's control of the government.

Scenes of tanks thundering through Moscow after the fall of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his age of reform have sent an unseasonable chill through Eastern Europe, where past victims of Stalinist aggression fear they are once again at the mercy of the Communist giant to the east.

Fearful that the Kremlin is regressing to the Stalinist excesses that enslaved them for decades, East European governments on Monday denounced the Soviet crackdown in Lithuania that killed more than a dozen unarmed civilians. "We cannot accept the military action in Lithuania. We condemn and deplore it," Hungarian Prime Minister Jozsef Antall told a special session of Parliament convened to discuss the Soviet crisis.

The World Bank, stepping up its assistance to the formerly communist republics of Eastern Europe, announced Wednesday that it has extended $680 million in loans to Poland and that it expects to offer an additional $1.5 billion to projects in the region in coming weeks. The loans are targeted at projects the bank believes are crucial to helping those nations make the difficult conversion from government-run to market economies.

No one can be sure whether Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has the will and imagination to quiet the deep, long-standing fears and suspicions that many in the world have about the Soviet Union. But there is little doubt that Gorbachev, with great charm and tact and flair, has managed in a relatively brief time to push Western diplomats and their old assumptions far off balance.

The Soviet Union and its former satellites in East Europe agreed here Monday, in a significant signal of shifting economic policies, to embrace the principles of free enterprise, private property and a market economy. Moscow and the old East Bloc countries endorsed a series of liberal economic principles at the 35-nation European economic conference as a way of encouraging foreign investment and their own private sectors.

The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia pledged on Friday to respect the right of all Communist parties to choose their own paths, saying they have no intention of imposing their systems on anyone. Analysts said the declaration, in a joint statement at the end of a visit to Yugoslavia by Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, formally invalidated the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty that justified Soviet intervention if Communist states deviated from the path mapped by the Kremlin.

A major dispute within the Soviet Communist Party over "who lost Eastern Europe" broke into the open Tuesday with Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov facing off in pungent newspaper interviews in advance of a crucial party congress scheduled for next week.

The sense of occasion surrounding the London NATO summit that ended here Friday left few in any doubt that the changes agreed to by the alliance's 16 member countries represent a watershed development. But the London summit is likely to shape Europe's future in ways that were hardly mentioned in the afterglow of Friday's agreement.

With their 41-year-old alliance on the verge of being overtaken by history, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unveiled on Friday a dramatic new blueprint for the future that President Bush said charts a "new course" for a long-divided Europe and "extends the hand of friendship" to old adversaries. "NATO has set a new path for peace," Bush declared as a two-day summit of alliance leaders ended. " . . .

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization made an unprecedented offer Thursday to Eastern European nations and the Soviet Union to participate in sweeping political and military cooperation. On the first day of a two-day meeting here, the NATO foreign ministers issued a declaration reaching out to their onetime Communist enemies in the now-disbanded Warsaw Pact military alliance.

Under the looming threat of a backlash by conservatives in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel asked Thursday for increased support from--but not yet full membership in--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Havel, becoming the first head of an Eastern European government to address NATO, acknowledged that the transformation of the former Soviet satellites into democratic societies and capitalist economies faces "more impediments than was originally expected."

It was a funeral at which no tears were shed and those paying respects could hardly be called bereaved. The 35-year-old Warsaw Pact was buried Monday with little ceremony and less regret, formally ending Eastern Europe's military enslavement to the Kremlin. Foreign and defense ministers of the six remaining member countries gathered in Budapest for the final arrangements, ironically returning to the scene of their first common crime.

It is the stuff of techno-fiction novels, but to some U.S. government analysts, it could become a post-Cold War nightmare--a mutiny by Soviet troops left in Germany that threatens to destroy Europe's new order. As the Persian Gulf War moves inexorably toward its conclusion, President Bush is being warned that growing instability in the Soviet Union could upset the peace in Europe.

The Soviet Union, accepting the final collapse of the security buffer it built across Eastern Europe, agreed on Tuesday with its partners in the Warsaw Pact to dismantle the alliance's military structure by April. "The countries that make up the Warsaw Treaty Organization have concluded that the time has come to take steps to wind up the organization's military structure," presidential press secretary Vitaly N. Ignatenko said. President Mikhail S.

The former Communist Party official was blunt and grave about his fears: "All signs point to a strong military dictatorship emerging in the Soviet Union," he said. "Not only is Hungary afraid of this, but all the other countries of this region are afraid of this as well." A politician in Budapest agreed.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, invited by NATO leaders to join them for a meeting symbolizing the burial of the Cold War, said Friday that he is ready to go, and he hailed changes that the West made in its strategy at a time when his conduct of foreign policy is coming under fierce criticism at home.

It is the stuff of techno-fiction novels, but to some U.S. government analysts, it could become a post-Cold War nightmare--a mutiny by Soviet troops left in Germany that threatens to destroy Europe's new order. As the Persian Gulf War moves inexorably toward its conclusion, President Bush is being warned that growing instability in the Soviet Union could upset the peace in Europe.

Fearful that the Kremlin is regressing to the Stalinist excesses that enslaved them for decades, East European governments on Monday denounced the Soviet crackdown in Lithuania that killed more than a dozen unarmed civilians. "We cannot accept the military action in Lithuania. We condemn and deplore it," Hungarian Prime Minister Jozsef Antall told a special session of Parliament convened to discuss the Soviet crisis.

Freed from the hated military alliance that snuffed out their earlier bids for freedom, the new democracies of Eastern Europe now seem united only by a common will to break away from the Kremlin. The Warsaw Pact, as a defense bloc, has been disarmed by a conventional weapons accord and appears destined for dissolution at a summit in Budapest expected early next year. Soviet President Mikhail S.