So Who’s Next in Eastern Europe?

Public opinion, which for four decades and more was denied open expression in Eastern Europe, has now emerged as a major political force. Suddenly, in countries where any sign of political dissent could be expected to bring down the full repressive wrath of the state, mass protests are not only being tolerated but actually listened to.

In East Germany, the unpopular Egon Krenz, successor to the deposed and now arrested neo-Stalinist hard-liner Erich Honecker, has been forced to quit his largely ceremonial post as president. Last week, after only a few weeks on the job, Krenz resigned as boss of the once all-powerful but now rapidly disintegrating Communist Party. In Czechoslovakia at the same time, a government named just days ago is about to be replaced because of public fury over its domination by Communists. This time, promises Premier Ladislav Ademic, the pro-democracy Civic Forum movement will be consulted before a new government with a large component of non-Communists is named.

East Germany’s Communists plan to hold an emergency congress Friday to choose new leaders and to try to salvage some measure of credibility. This desperate effort comes as public disgust mounts over disclosures that both party and government are riddled with corruption. No one in the West will be surprised to learn that the masters of a nominally egalitarian society in fact lived as luxuriously as any plutocrat made rich by the sweat of the working class. But in East Germany, where the life styles of the rich and infamous were a closely held secret, the revelations have brought genuine shock and outrage.

Can the Communists hang on in East Germany and Czechoslovakia? It would be uncharacteristic for those who have held absolute power for so long simply to slink away into the political wilderness. Yet so discredited and demoralized have the parties become, so unimaginably swiftly have events progressed in this last, particularly remarkable week, that such a retreat begins to look not only plausible but increasingly likely.