The peace issue goes east.

THE PEACE ISSUE GOES EAST

IT WAS MEANT to be a well-orchestrated chorus in praise of peace, a nuclear freeze, and the nuclear disarmament of the West. But to the great annoyance of the Kremlin, new voices have joined in, uninvited, from within its own domain, with variations on the theme.

Inadvertently, the peace movement in the West has struck sparks in the Soviet bloc, where, taking the official propaganda at face value, people have started joining the peace struggle with their own ideas and initiatives, as if it were not a government monopoly. The past four years have seen the founding, in Moscow, of the Group to Establish Trust between the USSR and the U.S.A. and, in Budapest, of the Peace Group for Dialogue; in Prague, the peace issue has been taken up by the Charter 77 Movement, as well as by individual dissidents. Small peace groups now apparently also exist in the Soviet Baltic republics, while East Germany has dozens of peace groups, aided and abetted by the local Protestant churches, themselves very outspoken on matters of peace and disarmament. Like the Third (human-rights) Basket of the Helsinki Accords, the peace issue in Eastern Europe has turned from propaganda window-dressing into an authentic movement, and this issue is potentially even more worrisome for the Communist governments than the human-rights issue.

THE GOVERNMENTS of the Soviet bloc are afraid of independent peace advocacy. They have never forgotten, even if everyone else may have by this time, that the very first-- and very successful--Communist peace campaign, Lenin's Bread and Peace campaign during World War I, effectively destroyed the fighting morale of the Russian army. Consequently, although they have found "peace' a marvelous foreign-policy tool, the commissars have always been nervous about it. It is a sort of political TNT, useful to wreck the enemy's positions, but to be handled with extreme care and under the strictest government control. Their Newspeak rigorously distinguishes "the struggle for peace' (laudable government-inspired and -conducted peace propaganda) from any spontaneous peace advocacy by unauthorized persons, which is "pacifism'--a bad word, and a deadly deviation.

But the new independent spokesmen for peace behind the Iron Curtain consider peace too important to be left to politicians and to agitprop. "Whoever endangers the truth in the interest of propaganda endangers peace itself,' Prague's Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek told the World Assembly for Peace, Life, and Nuclear Disarmament.

"Politicians cannot be quite objective regarding the questions of disarmament, hampered as they are by their special political interests and obligations,' the Moscow group said in its first proclamation (signed to date by more than one thousand sympathizers); therefore, "We propose a four-sided discussion in which the Soviet and the American publics should be included enjoying equal rights.'

But in order to form an intelligent opinion on such questions, citizens must be well informed, "which means that all parties [to the arms negotiations] should acquaint the inhabitants of their countries not only with their own proposals, data, and statistics, but also with those of the other parties,' the Charter 77 Movement said in an open letter to the World Assembly for Peace; while the Moscow group proposed a bulletin, jointly published by the U.S. and Soviet governments, which would contain the same data, Access to information and ability to influence the government's arms policy, however, necessarily require certain civil liberties, as all the peace activists in the Soviet bloc clearly realize; and this, in their eyes, ties the peace issue to the issue of human rights and, ultimately, to freedom. To quote Cardinal Tomasek again: "For peace remains but an empty worl . . . if it does not evolve in a social order based on truth and justice, buttressed by genuine love of one's neighbor, and brought to fruition in liberty.'

As against the official propaganda of the Eastern bloc, which blames the U.S. for the arms race, independent activists stress objectivity and evenhandedness. The Moscow group does "not want to accus either side . . . of having any aggressive plans for the future.' And the East German Protestant churches, in a joint declaration with West German Protestants, state: "Each side must take the security needs of the other side into consideration . . . Both sides must reduce those factors which arouse mistrust and fear.'

Beyond these shared concerns, however, the various groups also speak out on local peace-related issues, even some that until now have been taboo, since they involve only one of the big powers, the USSR. In Czechoslovakia, on the 15th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, Charter 77 wrote a letter to the Czechoslovakian parliament asking whether the Soviet troops "temporarily' stationed on Czech territory in 1968 should not finally be withdrawn, which would "doubtless strengthen the peace in Central Europe.' And with the Soviet decision to station its SS-20s in Eastern Europe, peace protest became a mass movement. Protest petitions were circulated for signatures in schools and factories in several cities. Most were promptly confiscated by the police. But one petition, signed by 939 people, reached both President Husak and some emigre publications in the West. It said: "If we are really sincere about peace . . . we must protest against nuclear arms anywhere in the world. Therefore, we protest against their stationing in Czechoslovakia.' Meanwhile, the official press in Prague cautiously admitted it also got many protests from its readers--or, as it put it, from readers "who did not understand' the decision.

In East Germany at about the same time, the Protestant churches demanded that no new short-range Soviet rockets be based on East German territory. But in East Germany the main target of the churches and the "peace discussion groups' (made up mostly of students and young workers) is what they call the general "militarization of life.' They speak against paramilitary education in the schools and demand conscientious-objector status for military recruits. Even there, though, with a peace discussion group in every large town, the peace movement was described by a West German author as "more a mood than a movement.'

Yet it is the mood that worries the authorities. The same mood that surfaced in Wenceslaus Square at the time of the World Assembly for Peace meeting in Prague, where three hundred young people staged their very own peace demonstration, shouting "Down with the army!' "We want peace and freedom!' "Disarm the soldiers!' "Neutrality!' The mood that in the USSR itself was excoriated by then Marshal Ogarkov two years ago. He charged Soviet youth with complacency, unconcern, and a "simplistic view' that "any kind of peace is good and any kind of war is bad.'

The Communist regimes' more immediate problem is that these gatecrashers into their mighty peace campaign are heartily championed by many "peace fighters' in the West. On the Western European Left, supporting human-rights activists and peace advocates in the Soviet realm has become almost a new radical chic. During the World Assembly for Peace meeting in Prague, all the pillars of the Western peace campaign made a point of visiting with Charter 77 representatives (who were barred from the sessions); and a group of Green Party deputies even signed a joint declaration with them that termed the issues of peace and human rights "indivisible.' However, while many on the Left have now regained sight in one eye, and can see the Soviet Union as an oppressor, few of them can yet see it as an aggressor; and it is in this respect that the educational influence of Eastern European peace advocates is now beginning to be felt. The question of evenhandedness --whether to blame just the U.S. or both the big powers--has lately caused acrimonious dissension, and even a partial split, within the West German peace camp. Which considerably complicates matters for Moscow.

As the Communist regimes know, the peace advocates, though few, speak for millions; and their courage makes their voices more influential with the West than their numbers would lead one to expect. Therefore, they are viciously persecuted. In Hungary, the Peace Group for Dialogue was forced to disband and driven underground. In East Germany; members of the most outspoken peace group have been forced to emigrate; draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors draw stiff jail sentences. (But their very appearance, especially in the USSR, is news in itself.) In the Soviet Union three members of the Group to Establish Trust were sentenced to jail terms ranging from one year (plus internal exile) to six years; the founder of the group, Sergei Batovrin, was tortured in a psykhushka (psychiatric "hospital') and later made to leave the country. Others are being harassed by searches and detention. Nevertheless, new Groups to Establish Trust have sprung up in Akademgorodok (one of the "science towns'--self-contained towns set up as "fortresses' of scientific productivity, away from the distractions of a big city--near Novosibirsk) and in Odessa, while in Moscow an Independent Initiative peace group has been founded. Apparently, a troublesome little white bird straying over the territory of the Soviet empire is not as easily shot down as a civilian airliner.