Romania: Death of a Dictator : Barren Trees Sported Pears, and Ceausescu Fell : Dissent: Drama students and others who turned the dictator’s taunt against him face a harder task in shaping a new government.

In his penultimate speech, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu boasted that Soviet-style reform would come to his country “when apple trees grow pears.” Historians may well record the phrase as the one that finally precipitated his fall.

In the days that followed, theater and cinema students in Bucharest hung all the pears they could find on the barren December trees that lined the capital’s main street.

The taunt so infuriated Ceausescu that he ordered his Securitate secret police to identify the perpetrators and attack the students in their dormitories last Thursday, killing many of them. Other students took to the university square, where more than 100 were slaughtered that night.

The next day, students organized by a popular actor named Ion Caramitru began the catcalls that interrupted the final Ceausescu speech, triggering his flight and the mass uprising that followed.

If drama students were able to topple one government, however, they may be singularly unprepared to install another.

For one thing, the National Salvation Front, the provisional government, originally was a loosely formed, polyglot collection of actors, poets, writers, film directors, military officers, student leaders and former Communist Party officials. No single member can boast a national political stature.

“It is not a government of poets but a government of actors,” said Vladimir Tismaneanu, a resident scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. It was Tismaneanu who learned during a phone call Christmas night from Romania of the pears on the apple trees.

And although the front’s management experience is severely lacking, it faces tremendous obstacles as it tries to run the country, feed its people and prepare for democratic elections in April.

Its economic program was described vaguely by Ion Grigorescu, a writer and filmmaker, as “an open market with the laws of the open market.” Beyond that, little is known.

“We live at the moment of 1776,” he said, alluding to the American Revolution. “Could you ask George Washington (at that time) how he was going to make his government? He had to learn from his people.”

“It’s going to be messy for a while,” predicted Stephen Szabo of the National Defense University here. “No neat solutions. They say about 30% of all Romanians worked or were associated with the Ceausescu regime. If the new government gets too pristine and gets rid of all of them, it will be real chaos.”

After the upheavals in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Communist regimes imposed by Soviet tanks purged officials at factories, institutes, agencies and other organizations down through the third and even fourth levels of authority.

Inexperienced loyalists replaced purged officials, and both nations began economic declines from which they have yet to recover. It took the loyalists time to gain experience. Also, the governments then would not employ young, newly educated experts if their ideas were not rooted in old Communist ideology, according to Czechoslovak and Hungarian officials who were interviewed recently.

Today, at least three political parties are taking shape in Romania, and a half dozen more are expected to follow.

“Some will be parties of nostalgia,” said Tismaneanu, such as a national peasants party and a party for ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, both of which existed before World War II.

“There will also be a resurgence of the far right, a nationalist party that will be revenge-seeking against Communists and also anti-Semitic,” he added, “but I think it will be marginal.” The Communist Party will probably change its name, as it has elsewhere in East Europe, while it tries to win elections.

Some experts worry about a military-led takeover, particularly since Romania has no tradition of democracy and the nation will suffer considerable economic hardship in coming months. But others foresee disorderly democracy.

“We shouldn’t be too pessimistic about the absence of democratic experience,” Szabo said. “If anything, I worry about excessive pluralism. The peoples of Eastern Europe, after 40 years, are going to enjoy, even glory in, diversity for awhile.”

He predicted that even parties with few differences will avoid banding together because coalitions were forced upon them by the discredited and oppressive Communist regimes.

And reports indicate that infighting may already be occurring in the National Front. After talking to front members in Bucharest, for example, Tismaneanu said that “there are almost no representatives of real dissent on the council, just Gorbachevites or maybe Andropovites, ready to steal the revolution from those who made it.”

He was alluding to those seeking to reform communism in the style of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s mentor was an earlier Soviet leader, Yuri V. Andropov, who also had once run the Soviet KGB secret police.

The brightest spot in Romania’s economy is that the country has the least foreign debt of any East European nation, thanks to the Draconian economic measures imposed by Ceausescu. He paid off most of the nation’s $21 billion in loans because he did not want foreign banks to have any leverage on his grandiose, Stalin-like agricultural and industrial programs.

Unfortunately, other East European nations will be competing for available foreign capital.

“Western banks will probably see East Germany and Czechoslovakia as better bets for investment,” said John Lampe, a University of Maryland economic specialist on the region. “I don’t think private capital will rush into Romania. Economic recovery will depend on government-to-government help, or in the long term, on creation of joint ventures among several East European nations that will attract private money.”

The United States on Tuesday donated $500,000 to the Red Cross for humanitarian purposes in Romania, but it is a meager amount compared to the need. West European nations, particularly France with its large Romanian exile population, are expected to offer more significant economic aid in coming days.