COMMUNISTS: Detente Stops at Home

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CZECHOSLOVAKIA is planning to establish "houses of political education" throughout the country by 1975. Meanwhile the Husak regime plans a broadcast blitz stressing "the ever-improving conditions under socialism." Its main targets: the 2,000,000 Czechoslovaks who regularly tune in to Austrian and West German television.

Though BULGARIA is already Eastern Europe's most rigidly orthodox Communist country, it has ordered yet another "firm, systematic, irreconcilable offensive" on dissidents. So has RUMANIA. In HUNGARY and POLAND, where fragile experiments in limited liberalization are under way, talk of crackdowns is mostly just talk—at least so far—aimed at keeping Moscow calm. Western plays and films are still as popular as ever in Warsaw (now playing: Love Story, The Odd Couple and Vanishing Point), even if they are faring less well with the critics.

The East bloc leaders' fearful approach to détente reflects the desperate gamble they are taking. After all, Moscow and its Warsaw Pact partners decided on a limited accommodation with the West because they hungered for access, through trade, to Western capital and technology, which they hoped would rescue their economies in time to prevent serious social upheavals at home. The East bloc undertook this accommodation with full knowledge of the risk it faced in what West German Chancellor Willy Brandt calls Wandel Durch Annäherung—change through coming close. Actually, change is precisely what they hope to hold off; Moscow's chief aim at Helsinki is to legitimize the status quo in Eastern Europe. But now that they are dealing with the West, the Soviet-bloc regimes can no longer plausibly justify themselves by pointing to a threat posed by Western arms. Instead they plan to create an atmosphere of ideological siege.

Truce. Does it matter if, in Eastern Europe, detente stops at home? East-West relations could continue to expand on a government-to-government level, whatever the internal conditions in the East bloc. But without a flow of ideas and increased travel, especially from East to West, the vaunted era of detente will be merely an armed truce rather than a period of genuinely relaxed tensions. For those caught inside the East-bloc borders it will also be a period of repression and pretense. TIME'S Strobe Talbott talked to one East-bloc professor and author, who shrugged: "We have to chant Marxist-Leninist slogans because otherwise our leaders would get worried that the system that gives them their power is in danger. And if they begin to worry seriously that detente means an end to their own power, they'll never go ahead with all the treaties and agreements [with the West]."