Dictators Fade Away, Big Brother Refuses to Depart So Quietly : Eastern Europe: The people may be trying to reclaim their privacy, but the apparatus of terror is still there, even as it shreds its damning documents.

The sight of angry East Germans storming and ransacking buildings occupied by the secret police might upset those who expected the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe to quietly fade away once the Erich Honeckers, the Milos Jakes, the Todor Zhivkovs and the Nicolae Ceausescus were overthrown.

Lest we believe Gregor Gysi, the new East German party boss, that the unruly mobs “succumbed to violence directed at property,” we should ask: What kind of property came under attack?

The answer is information--secret files, telephone intercepts, purloined letters and personal records that the authorities kept on each East German citizen. The people came to reclaim from Big Brother their most precious property--their privacy, their right to be left alone and the freedom from official blackmail.

With the exception of Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel and Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the rest of East Europe’s top officials are still veteran Communists. Their commitment to democratization, to the dismantling of the coercive institutions of the totalitarian state and to the holding of free elections is, at best, dubious and yet to be demonstrated.

Throughout Eastern Europe, the old regimes were shielded from their people by the secret police, special army-police riot squads, the army, the regular police, the workers’ militia, special border guard detachments and paramilitary “social and sports” clubs. Though the Communist parties’ “private armies,” the workers’ militias, have been disarmed in three countries, the rest are still there under Communist ministers of Interior and Defense. The mad dogs of Ceausescu’s Securiatate may have been brought to heel, but elsewhere their comrades in the secret police apparatus are still very much in evidence.

In Bulgaria, the internal security folks are said to be helping the party conservatives incite the majority against the Turkish Muslim minority. In Poland, their brethren are still there to bash a head or two. In East Germany, the “furloughed” Stasi could be behind the neo-Nazi groups. Earlier this month in the presumably “almost democratic” Hungary, an oppositon party, the Alliance of Free Democrats, produced documentary evidence of secret police telephone monitoring and mail surveillance of the new opposition groups. To no one’s surprise, the “reformed” ruling Hungarian Socialist Party’s mail and telephone lines somehow escaped police scrutiny.

Meanwhile, the semi-deactivated “iron fists” of the old regimes are busy shredding documents and burning party and police archives before it is too late. What sustains them, other than desperation, is the hope that Mikhail Gorbachev will be overthrown sooner or later by the Soviet millitary and the KGB; that the West will remain preoccupied with economic issues, rather than human rights in Eastern Europe, and a wish that the people will eventually tire of taking to the streets every time a new violation of civil rights is discovered.

Such hope may be in vain. But for the time being, the odds still favor the armed thugs of the old regimes rather than the unarmed citizens of Eastern Europe. The building of democracy from the ruins of communism is a vexing business. The first step in that direction must be the immediate and unconditional disbanding of the terror machines of the old regimes. Western loans, joint ventures and economic rescue packages should be put on hold until it is clear whether it is the peoples of East Europe, or their half-reformed and unrepentant rulers, that the West is asked to bail out.