EAST BLOC IN TRANSITION : Aging Warriors Savoring Victory : Romania: Longtime foes of communism get together to push for national unity. All had been imprisoned.

The old men had been waiting 40 years for vindication, and they met Tuesday for the first time with an excitement that seemed to wipe away all the ills of old age, all the rheumatism and high blood pressure and heart problems, in a moment of triumph they could barely contain.

The Communists had been routed from Romania. Or at least the Communist, Nicolae Ceausescu, had been routed, along with his top henchmen.

“We fought them from the first,” said schoolteacher Ion Radu, who at 59 was among the youngest of the 60 men who gathered in a cold and empty house in the center of Bucharest.

Officially, they met as a section of the soon-to-be registered National Peasants Party. But their real purpose was to establish themselves as an organization of former political prisoners--the first avowed enemies of communism in Romania, and the first to suffer because of it.

Most of the men were in their 60s and 70s and had fought with Romanian anti-Communist resistance and Partisan movements at the end of World War II. They have vivid memories of encampments in the Carpathian Mountains, of guerrilla warfare with the Communists who took over at that time.

Others were rounded up in the Stalinist terror that swept the newly Communist nations of Eastern Europe after the war. Their prison terms ranged from five to 15 years, in the period of about 1946 to 1964, when most were released.

They returned to a Romania where communism was deeply entrenched, and they went on with their lives, in bitter silence. But they did not forget their fight as Romanian society, under the Ceausescu regime, grew steadily more oppressed.

And the mood Tuesday, as the old fighters met, bordered on euphoria, as they quarreled energetically over such things as how best to proceed with the election of officers, to press their case and, once again, to simply announce their existence.

“We suffer from two diseases right now,” Radu said. “First, we haven’t talked in so long that we cannot stop. And second, the longer a man talks, the more convinced he is that he is right. You must have patience with us.”

Strikingly, these old opponents of communism have found allies in the youngest opponents of communism, the youth who probably paid most dearly in the revolution that toppled the Ceausescu regime. Both sides see in the other a similar combative dedication to the anti-Communist cause.

“At the end of the war, the Peasants Party won 80% of the vote,” said Ion Radoi, a 25-year-old youth leader. “But the Communists falsified the election results, and many people were imprisoned after this. The common point is that they suffered--and so did we.”

The links between the old and the young have parallels in Poland and Hungary, where the youth find a closer kinship in political thinking with their grandfathers than with their parents.

In Poland, the cult surrounding the memory of Gen. Jozef Pilsudski, who led an independent Poland during the years between the world wars--and was the only Polish general to defeat the Soviets in battle--has equal adherents among the young and the elderly.

In Romania, anti-Communists were sent to work in labor camps on the Danube River-Black Sea canal project; thousands of them are believed to have died. The heads of both the Liberal and Peasants parties were convicted in show trials in 1947 and died in prison.

Among the most venerable members of the gathering in Bucharest on Tuesday was Gregore Brancusi, 79, who said he is a nephew of the Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, and who is famous as the leader of a resistance brigade that fought the Communists until 1951. He spent 13 years in prison.

“We are not interested in revenge,” Brancusi said. “We are interested in national unity.”

In careful handwriting in a small notebook, Brancusi has catalogued the veterans’ demands, which are to be presented to the new government. They go back to the beginning:

-- The 1946 elections should be declared illegal.

-- A list of political prisoners who died in prison and labor camps should be published.

-- Proper military decorations should be issued to army members who refused to join Communist forces.

-- The names of political, scientific and cultural figures who died in prison should be made public.

-- Statistics on the number of people passing through prisons and labor camps should be published.

-- Heads of prisons and work colonies should be brought to justice.

-- Personnel from prisons and work camps who tortured prisoners should be named.

-- Lawyers who were appointed to defend political prisoners and who failed to present an adequate defense should be identified.

-- Priests who informed on opposition activists should be expelled from the Orthodox Church and their names should be published.

-- Property taken from political prisoners and their families should be restored.

-- Pensions for secret police officers and top police officials should be reviewed and possibly revoked.

-- Romanians in exile should be invited back to contribute to the “moral purification” of the country.

It is not likely, given the pressing demands of making a new government work and, eventually, of administering elections and reordering a Communist economy, that these demands will be a matter of high priority for the new government.

But for most of those gathered Tuesday, this program does not matter. It is enough, as one of them said, to say that “we are still here.”

“In 1948, they pulled out my fingernails,” Alexandru Stoicescu said. “I was a lawyer, and when I came out of prison, I made paper bags to sell on the street. I lost my wife. I lost my child. But I am here. Today, I am here.”