NEWS ANALYSIS : Fear, Futility Fade and the Dominoes Fall : East Bloc: With the success of each demonstration, the citizens are getting bolder.

The East Germans, the Bulgarians and now the Czechoslovaks taking to the streets by the hundreds of thousands during this remarkable autumn in Eastern Europe are trampling beneath them the twin pillars of 40 years of Communist rule in the region--fear and futility.

The marchers represent both cause and effect, with the success of each demonstration further allaying fear of reprisals and encouraging more thousands to take part next time. Also, television footage of protests in one East European country is today far more likely than previously to be seen in another, multiplying the impact of any demonstration by “internationalizing” it.

As a result, each new mass protest accelerates the political chain reaction whose blinding speed has already left longtime students of the region agog.

“We have to adjust our sights or buy a new pair of glasses, because this is amazing,” Vlad Kusin, a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe in Munich, said.

“People smelled change in the air,” added George Schopflin, lecturer in East European politics at the London School of Economics. “And then all the inhibitions and all the fears left. They realized it’s OK to take to the streets, because they won’t be alone.”

More than that, said Jacques Rupnik, a senior fellow at the Center for International Affairs’ Foundation Nationale Science Politique in Paris, fear has switched sides in Eastern Europe.

With little genuine popular support, the hard-line regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have long been fragile. So, Rupnik noted, once the population begins to believe that there will be no Soviet invasion and that their own security forces will not shoot them down in the street, “the fear switches from the society to the people in power. This is what we’re seeing now in Prague.”

Repeated use of deadly force to put down unauthorized outbursts of public disaffection--in East Germany in 1953, Poland and Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland again in 1970, 1976 and 1981--made fear the ally of Communist regimes.

And even when fear began to lose its power, such as in Solidarity-led Poland, there remained a sense of the futility of protest. But now, with the Solidarity coalition government in Warsaw and with Hungary preparing for the region’s first free national elections in 40 years, the sense of futility has given way to a domino theory of regional reform.

The Hungarians credit the Poles for the first major political breakthrough, winning government agreement to share power with Solidarity. That proved that Moscow was willing to put up with more far-reaching political reform than most in the region had dared hope.

Budapest, in turn, helped force East Berlin’s hand by punching the first symbolic holes in the Iron Curtain and then opening its borders to East Germans fleeing to the West.

Thousands left through Hungary, then through Czechoslovakia--and thousands more demonstrated for change at home.

A key element of Stalinist-style social control has always been to isolate individuals as much as possible from each other by spreading fear and mistrust, Schopflin noted. But “the moment that starts to break down, people come together again,” he said.

In a European tradition dating from the French Revolution, the London scholar added, that means going into the streets: Wide boulevards and big squares in the Continent’s major cities are made to order for such protests.

Even as postwar Eastern European regimes suppressed all forms of spontaneous public demonstrations, they staged their own carefully choreographed, “rent-a-crowd” versions for ritual homage to Communist leaders and holidays.

Now, Schopflin said, “It’s a way of saying ‘This is the only political mechanism available to us. We will make use of it.’ ”

“Perhaps the critical point was reached when East Germany began to tip,” said Kusin, the Radio Free Europe analyst. What he termed the four “rejectionist countries”--East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria--”survived to a certain extent on the idea that Poland and Hungary are special: ‘We can fence ourselves in. We don’t have to imitate what they’re doing. Fat lot of good it’s all done for the Poles, anyway.’ ”

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev put an end to that idea by withdrawing Moscow’s support from the hard-liners, Rupnik said, adding: “He has unleashed something that he cannot control. He has destabilized the ruling elites . . . . That’s his main achievement.”

The first to go among the four was East Germany’s Erich Honecker, followed by Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov. And their departures added to the sense that the moment for change had arrived--that it was no longer futile to demand it.

Once the new leadership in East Germany opened its borders, effectively neutralizing the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia was bound to be caught up in the maelstrom, Rupnik said.

“With a Solidarity government in Poland, free elections in Hungary and the wall coming down in Berlin, how on earth can you keep pretending that nothing is happening in Prague?” he asked.

There was a telling moment during a demonstration in Leipzig on Monday, when a student told the crowd he had come from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. The East Germans cheered wildly.

Kusin, who saw the incident on West German television, called it symbolic of another important element in the East European drama. “The ‘internationalization’ (of protests) must be taken as largely responsible for the speed with which things have happened,” he said.

Radio Free Europe, his employer, is another force for breaking down the barriers that had formerly isolated East Europeans from each other, as are other Western radio stations like the BBC, Voice of America and Deutsche Welle.

Radio Free Europe has been receiving a steadily increasing flow of telephone calls from East European listeners, according to Deputy Director Robert Gillette.

“What we’ve done is help contribute to this process of the lifting of fear--being able to reach out and touch the outside world with nothing happening to them,” Gillette said.

Television is also an increasingly important element. The western third of Czechoslovakia, for example, has long been able to view West German or Austrian newscasts, making them almost instantly aware of events outside the country no matter what Czechoslovak television does. But now Czechoslovaks living near the borders with East Germany, Poland and Hungary can see nearly as much on broadcasts from those nations as well.

Elsewhere, liberalized Soviet television beamed into East European living rooms has become a force for reform. That is particularly true of Bulgaria; in addition, before he was ousted Honecker had stopped circulation in East Germany of some Soviet publications that he found too full of glasnost, or openness, for his doctrinaire tastes.

“Exhilarating and heartening though these street politics are,” the London Times cautioned Tuesday, “it is nonetheless important to recognize the limits of what has so far been achieved.” While free elections have been promised, for example, they are in all cases weeks or months away.

East European experts agree, although they are generally optimistic. “In broad terms, the system has run out of steam,” Schopflin said.