EAST BLOC IN TURMOIL : Life Hectic for U.S. Experts on East Bloc : Diplomacy: The upheaval has brought a bureaucratic backwater into the spotlight.

Their once-measured pace of work has accelerated to a nonstop, 12-hour-a-day clip. The White House, which earlier seemed unaware of their existence, now calls several times a day.

Welcome to the suddenly hectic life in the U.S. government offices watching events in Eastern Europe--a longtime bureaucratic backwater that now finds itself in the eye of history.

At the State Department, the staff expert on Czechoslovakian affairs is suddenly in demand to talk to members of Congress, reporters and private citizens. At the Commerce Department, the desk officer for Hungary responds to 30 or more telephone calls a day from American businessmen hoping to make their fortune in the capitalistic renaissance sweeping Eastern Europe.

In the State Department’s Eastern European office, harried diplomats amuse themselves with office pools on when the next Communist regime will fall.

“The pace of change has been remarkable,” said Curtis J. Kamman, the State Department’s top Eastern European expert. “The work load, the flow of paper and everything else is much heavier, and we have very little additional help. Our staffing in the department doesn’t expand easily.”

The department regularly assigns several specialists to desks that monitor nations where diplomatic activity is extensive and the United States carefully tends policy interests--nations like Japan. But in Eastern Europe, it is only one officer per country. So far, the staff has been able to cope by working much longer hours, buoyed by the rush of adrenalin that comes from being in the middle of something big.

“The direction of events is positive,” Kamman said. “It is easier to react to positive events than when the situation is deteriorating.”

Kamman’s deputy, James Hooper, said: “The thing you are doing (now) is not the usual bureaucratic crap. You can see the connection between what you are doing and a larger purpose.”

For years, the State Department and Commerce Department desks that follow events in the Communist-ruled nations of Eastern Europe were overshadowed by the more glamorous offices watching the Soviet Union--much in the same way as Moscow dominated its satellites. It was a static job that appealed mostly to people with a strong academic or personal interest in a region where 1,000 years of history seemed to be submerged in a bog of stagnation. The Bible of the government bureaucrat--a detailed job description known as the “work requirement statement”--seemed to go for years without significant revision.

No longer.

“Things are changing so fast that the work requirement statements are going straight from the typewriter to the shredder,” Hooper said. “You go out of the office for lunch and when you get back another government has fallen.”

Hooper’s job always has required him to meet frequently with diplomats from East European countries. That hasn’t changed, but the East European diplomats have.

“They have real smiles on their faces,” Hooper said. “They are more inclined to use our first names instead of the stilted formality they used to use. One of the bloc ambassadors is returning to sender any letter addressed ‘Dear Comrade.’ ”

At the Commerce Department, officials are swamped with requests for information on how to do business in Eastern Europe.

“We used to get eight to 10 calls a day; now it is 30 to 40, and if there is something in the newspaper about Hungary, we can get 60 or 70 calls that day,” said Russell Johnson, the Commerce desk officer for that nation. “Some people come to us with basically no knowledge whatsoever. With some you have to start out right from the beginning and explain that these are non-market economies with non-convertible currencies.

“The calls run the gamut from people who are knitting lace doilies on the side and want to sell them to Hungary to Fortune 500 companies that want to set up joint ventures,” Johnson said.

Often, he said, his job consists of trying to dissuade naive capitalists from plunging into the turbulent Eastern Europe market.

“It is true that smaller companies find it more difficult to work in these countries, and we try to be up front about it,” Johnson said.

At the State Department, some career diplomats have been grumbling that Secretary of State James A. Baker III and his close circle of advisers run foreign policy by themselves, without the help of the department’s professionals. But the Eastern Europe specialists have no such complaints.

When the pace of events caught the attention of the upper levels of the State Department and the White House, the Eastern European specialists found that they, almost alone in the government, knew the names, places and issues that were shaping a revolution.

“No one can concentrate on everything at once,” said Cameron Munter, the State Department’s desk officer for Czechoslovakia. “Both the Seventh Floor (the State Department’s top officials) and the White House have had a number of other things to look at. Now that they are confronted with a situation that we know about, we find that what we know is in more demand.”

In theory, the State Department’s country desks collect and analyze the most accurate factual information they can obtain. It is up to higher-ranking officials to put the political spin on the facts. Sometimes, when conditions do not change very much from day to day, the desks have little to do.

“If there are a lot of chiefs in the State Department, we are the Indians,” Munter said. “We are supposed to create the raw product that can be shaped at higher levels into policy.”

These days, Munter and his colleagues on other Eastern European desks arrive at the department no later than 8 a.m. each day. Their first priority is to prepare the press statements that will be issued by department spokesman Margaret Tutwiler or her aides. The statements are supposed to represent the U.S. government’s up-to-the-minute policy concerning global issues. With reporters’ questions about East European developments now numerous, and the issues in question quite sensitive, drafting the appropriate pronouncements and getting the necessary high-level clearances often takes hours.

And by the time 10 a.m. arrives in Washington, it is 4 p.m. in Prague, almost the end of another day that, more likely than not, produced political events that would have been unthinkable six months ago. Already, the “in” basket on Munter’s desk is piled high with new cables from the embassy in Prague and other messages.

He said he starts to go through the messages, but the routine is frequently interrupted by calls from senior State Department officials or from the White House for background papers needed for urgent meetings.

Some desk officers stay at their posts until 9 p.m. many days to catch up with the cable traffic. Others take the messages home to read there.

“It is very rare that I have time to think about what it all means,” Munter said. “That is a potential hazard.”