FREEING EUROPE

Two years later, from their home in West Germany, they watched the Berlin Wall come down and the two Germanys unite. But even now, ten years after their leaving, they will not go back to the East. Stefan has seen his file, three hundred pages from the Communists’ secret police, and he knows now too well the extent to which he was betrayed: the teacher, the colleague, the waiter, the church worker, the relative — all working as informers, the little “red lanterns” of the “Stasi,” the infamous East German secret police. Some have become new capitalists, while others claim the status of victims themselves. But they’re all still there, the collaborators who made the Communist oppression possible.

This plaint is by no means unique. For the millions like my friends — and, Stefan reminds me, for innumerable others whose suffering was “much, much worse” — no reckoning has yet been made of the crimes committed in the former Soviet bloc. It is against this indefinite deferral of justice that George Urban cries in his new Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy. “Snooping, spying, and denunciations flourished throughout the empire,” he mourns, “yet no post-Communist government, with the partial exception of the Czech, has been pressed hard enough by public opinion to cleanse the state completely of that shameful legacy.” A former director of Radio Free Europe — and a man with many reasons, some highly selfless and some highly selfish, for not wanting to let go of the past — Urban has composed in this posthumously published volume what is at once a memoir of his role in the fight against communism and a spirited denunciation of “the predominant inclination . . . to close the books on the Cold War.”

With the crimes of communism too well documented now to admit much dispute, Radio Free Europe rightly spends little energy attacking the Communists themselves. Urban’s reckoning is rather with the less visible but in some ways equally formidable opponent America and its allies faced during the Cold War: those in the West who sympathized, apologized, temporized, and appeased.

“So much of our time and energy,” he writes, was spent “fighting off the mischief of those who seemed, formally at least, to be on our side of the conflict but had in reality come under the spell of the Soviet system.” As Urban points out, the principal Cold War battles were often fought over ” words, ideas, perceptions.” It is a remarkably important but little noticed element in the history of America’s foreign policy that in such battles the intellectuals — poets, scholars, journalists, analysts, economists, and historians — assumed the importance of admirals and generals in shaping the lines of attack.

In the momentous debates of these intellectuals, Urban was among the few who saw clearly the evils of communism, and he contributed a great deal to the intellectual campaign to defeat it. His interviews published in the journal Encounter are legendary; his skills as a scholar and polemicist are renowned. After serving as a middle-level executive from 1960 to ’65 and then as a political consultant, he became director of Radio Free Europe in 1983.

Radio Free Europe was, like Radio Liberty, an international broadcasting network created after World War II to fight the battle of ideas through the airwaves. While Radio Liberty transmitted to the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe’s domain was the rest of the eastern bloc. Both aimed their broadcasts over the Iron Curtain. Both were funded by the American government, although they remained largely outside its control. And both were intended to defend unapologetically liberal democracy and the free-market economy.

Urban’s account of Radio Free Europe serves one useful purpose in clearing away misinformation that has long circulated about the network. Detractors have often charged, for instance, that Radio Free Europe fomented the tragic 1956 Hungarian Revolt. But Urban, after examining materials made available only after the fall of communism, concludes that the network neither caused the revolt nor encouraged Hungarian freedom fighters with the promise of Western military assistance.

Urban’s tale serves a second useful purpose in reminding us just how controversial anti-communism was in the many circles in which muddle- headedness and moral relativism ran rampant. A founding editor of the academic journal Studies in Comparative Communism, Urban was once urged by a department chairman at the University of Southern California to include pro-Communist articles for balance — lest the publication be branded unscholarly and biased. During the Carter administration, a chairman of Radio Free Europe’s board (eager to illustrate the network’s commitment to fairness) proposed that Urban invite Soviet and East European Communist officials to the studio to judge the accuracy and objectivity of broadcasts.

Urban’s scathing criticism is bipartisan. During Reagan’s presidency, for instance, a senior official vigorously rejected the idea that Radio Free Europe should report the names of Polish prison guards widely acknowledged by dissident sources to be engaged in violent and sadistic acts against political prisoners. Only when the crimes were a matter of public record, it was reasoned, should such incidents be reported. The difficulty of having such matters made public in a totalitarian society seems not to have occurred to Urban’s opponent at the network.

Similarly, Urban relates how, in the name of detente, articles by Vladimir Bukovsky, George Will, Paul Lendvai, John Vinocur, and other distinguished anti-Communists were frequently suppressed by Radio Free Europe because their analyses and prescriptions were thought to promote instability in the East. (Cautionary tags such as “oversimplified,” “overwritten,” “overdramatized,” and “unbalanced” were pinned on offending items in the network’s daily recommended list.) Too often, an exasperated Urban argues, “the American bureaucracy shared the Kremlin’s platform.” Milovan Djilas, for example, was censored when he had the audacity to forecast a ripple effect from the rise of Solidarity and the 1981 crackdown in Poland.

The fact remains, however, that whatever useful purposes Urban performs for us in settling these historical accounts, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy contains Urban’s attempt to settle his own accounts as well. He missed a job early in his career with the BBC Monitoring Service because he was insufficiently open “to the new facts of life in Eastern Europe.” He was frequently, as he puts it, “penalized for speaking the truth before it was opportune to do so.” When he retired in frustration in 1986, it was after having been defeated at the network on issues of political vetting and censorship, among other things.

To some extent, this is fair enough. There is no doubt Urban took his lumps, a victim of the time’s political correctness. But he does not always observe the difference between setting the record straight for the sake of history and setting the record straight for the sake of triumph over old bureaucratic foes. And a certain heavy-handedness and self-congratulation in the book tests the patience of even the most sympathetic of readers: “I had, apparently,” he confides, “a reputation for not suffering Communists, appeasers, and fools gladly.”

As a result, Urban comes across at times as acerbic and ungenerous. He praises Margaret Thatcher, for instance, when she agrees with him: On Cold War issues, she had a tremendous “thirst for knowledge” and rare ” intellectual curiosity.” But he tears at her mercilessly when their views part: On European monetary union, she was “nationalistic,” “anti-European,” ” narrow-minded,” “petulant,” and “xenophobic.” (Urban had this out in his 1996 Diplomacy and Disillusion at the Court of Margaret Thatcher; it is a pity he felt obliged to take additional swipes here.)

At other times, however, Urban can be insightful, affectionate, and admiring. In a chapter about the numerous personalities with whom he worked, he shares engaging vignettes about Djilas, Melvin Lasky, Ignazio Silone, and Alexander Zinoviev, among others. And even in Urban’s bitter moments, this work composed before his death last October reminds us that a reckoning has not yet been brought home to those who collaborated with and appeased a demented and murderous system.

Certainly for my East German friends — unable to forget the suffering the Communists caused, unable to bring themselves even to visit a homeland full of unpunished and unrepentant informers — this is a reminder we very much need. The books of justice, in both the East and the West, remain open.

Jeffrey Gedmin is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and executive editor at the New Atlantic Initiative.