NEWS ANALYSIS : Reformers Want More Than Retribution, They Want a Purge : East Bloc: There is a sense of urgency because the abuse of history has been as bad as the abuse of power.

Czechoslovaks demanding punishment for people who helped in the Soviet invasion of 1968, and East Germans besieging Communist Party offices to ensure that no evidence of corruption is destroyed, want more than just retribution.

They are caught up, along with people in Hungary and Poland, in an effort to wipe away the moral wreckage of decades.

It is as though the air had become so fouled with lies and deceit that the only way these people can see to go forward is by means of a thorough purge.

All revolutionaries want to discredit the leaders they have thrown out, but there is an unusual sense of urgency about the process in East Europe, in part because the abuse of history in the region has been as bad as the abuse of power.

When Czechoslovaks insist on correcting the record on 1968, the year of the so-called Prague Spring, and when Hungarians raise the same cry with regard to 1956, the year their uprising was crushed, they do more than strip away the authorities’ veneer of legitimacy; they buy a bit of insurance that the reforms of recent weeks will not be rolled back.

Along with the desire to purge the people responsible for the past there is a sense of personal purge. The collapsing Communist systems were so riddled with corruption and failure that the vast majority of the people had to make compromises of their own.

According to Ladislav Lis, an activist member of the Czechoslovak opposition group Civic Forum, the “normalization” imposed by the Soviet-backed leaders who took over after the repression in 1968 “caused the moral devastation of our society and national humiliation.”

A former Communist Party official who was expelled after 1968 put it this way: “There is hardly anybody in Czechoslovakia who hasn’t, as we say, got some ‘butter on his head.’ ” All it takes is a little sunlight to expose it.

Similarly, according to Judith Pataki, an expert on Hungarian affairs with Radio Free Europe, the system devised in Hungary by former party chief Janos Kadar, who took over after the 1956 uprising, “was built so much on corruption that it drew into it almost everyone.”

Thus in moving to set the record straight, the people seem to be reaching back to a time when they felt better about themselves.

At the very least, the new freedom to express outrage helps to erase any guilt about any personal shortcuts that might have been taken, though this of course is not meant to understate the legitimate feelings of betrayal that pervade the region.

In Czechoslovakia, half a million party members who supported the reforms of the Prague Spring were expelled as a result. Their attempt at building “socialism with a human face” was branded counterrevolutionary and Western-inspired. Their careers, and in many cases those of their children, were destroyed.

Perhaps 100,000 Czechoslovaks were hounded out of the country and into exile, while their tormentors erased the reforms and settled into a comfortable life style secured by Soviet power.

“You see these people living in villas, and you’ve lost 20 years of your life,” a Western diplomat commented. “Psychologically you need some healing of your wounds. It’s very difficult to resist this tendency.”

The diplomat was impressed earlier this week when a huge crowd of anti-government demonstrators, about 200,000 strong, took on an aggressive edge on the issue of 1968.

“We await the day,” Lis, the opposition leader, told the crowd, “when the names of those who inspired this shameful deal will finally be published. We have an inalienable right for their guilt to be investigated!”

“Punish them!” the protesters shouted. “Punish them!”

The Western diplomat said that “what I fear is that if this thing . . . gets down to these personal fights and revenge elements, then it loses its moral purity and everything is open.”

The level of outrage in East Germany over disclosures of high-level corruption has surprised Western experts almost as much as the East German leaders.

Barbara Donovan, a Radio Free Europe analyst of East German affairs, said in an interview that one reason for this may be that the East Germans have always seen themselves as somehow “cleaner” than their neighbors in the region. It has been a central element in justifying the existence of an East German state next to capitalist West Germany.

In East Germany, she said, there has been little rush to the past--to the ill-fated 1953 uprising in Berlin, or to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The corruption issue, she said, “has become the East German 1968 or (Hungarian) 1956--the first political issue that people can attach themselves to.”

Corruption was also a big issue in Poland, in 1980, after Solidarity, the independent trade union movement, got under way. But the outcry was never as loud and never reached as high into the leadership as that in East Germany.

When the Poles go after political skeletons in the closet, they look first for those with a Soviet label. Significantly, when Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity man, made his first official trip to the Soviet Union recently, he visited Katyn--the site of a World War II massacre of Polish army officers, long blamed by Moscow on Nazi Germany but widely believed to have been carried out by Soviet security services.

The effect of the Polish approach is much the same, however. By discrediting the Soviets, they discredit the system the Soviets imposed. The idea that a Pole could possibly be a part of that system is so repugnant that most Poles prefer to think of their Communist Party leaders as Soviet agents. Former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger is not the only one who has referred to Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s president, as a “Russian general in a Polish uniform.”

The powerful drive to sort out the past extends to people who were not even around in 1956 or in 1968. Jiri Dienstbier Jr., 20, was prevented from entering a college preparatory study program for two years because of the dissident activities of his father, a former journalist who is now a spokesman for Civic Forum.

For young people, a Western diplomat in Prague pointed out, there is a question of identity.

“You need to know what happened in the past for your own identity,” he said.

There is a drawback to all this. Poles, Hungarians, Czechoslovaks and East Germans sometimes seem so preoccupied with the past that they lose sight of the need to build a future.

A Hungarian journalist said she quit her job because she got fed up with co-workers arguing about who had done what after 1956.

Jeno Kovacs, a member of the Hungarian Socialist Party Presidium, told an interviewer: “We’ve been dealing with the history of 40 years of unsettled political problems, which in a normal country would be low-key issues.”

What is needed, he said, is to get on with economic reform, but “as long as just history and politics are in the center of political and press attention, business is starving.”

Still, he said, because of so many years of lies and concealment “it was unavoidable and necessary to discuss these questions; it was a precondition for further steps.”

The Czechoslovaks and East Germans, now going down that same road, would no doubt agree.