COLUMN ONE : Stalinist Legacy of Foul Air : Eastern Europe’s new governments are left to battle environmental devastation wrought by the era of unrestricted heavy industry.

This day, like most days, thin, pale children crowd the corridor that serves as a waiting room at Dr. Ladislav Peychl’s clinic. Some lie quietly in their parents’ arms. Some wander about fretfully. All cough.

Outside, a light rain falls, dampening the ever-present soot into a blackish mud. The rain is laden with acid, etching ever-deeper lines into buildings and adding a few more dead trees to the ranks of denuded trunks that line Teplice’s streets each spring.

The poisoned rain and the coughing children are measures of what Teplice has become.

This small city in northwestern Czechoslovakia, hard by the East German border, was once internationally renowned as a health spa. Today, sitting in a narrow valley surrounded by coal-fired power plants that produce roughly half the nation’s electricity, Teplice has become a symbol of environmental devastation--and of the health problems such devastation brings.

And scenes such as those found here are scattered throughout Eastern Europe. For four decades, Communist governments warped their nations’ political systems, suppressed historic cultures and terrorized opponents. But even the scars of those abuses may be healed before the region’s new governments can reverse the environmental legacy of foul air, contaminated land, poisoned water and sickened people.

“It’s a catastrophe in the making,” says Barbara Jancar, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Brockport and an expert on East European environmental problems.

In some areas, the catastrophe is already at hand.

Peychl, chief pediatrician for the regional hospital here, and his colleagues receive a constant flow of children suffering from asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory ailments. The infant mortality rate here is about 30% higher than in the rest of the country, the overall life expectancy two years lower, the adult cancer rate 20% worse.

So unhealthy has the environment of Teplice become that doctors themselves are reluctant to move here. Peychl has five vacancies on his staff that he has been unable to fill. The situation is little better in many other parts of the country.

“We have the worst environment in the whole of Europe,” Czechoslovakia’s new president, Vaclav Havel, told his countrymen in his New Year’s address.

And, while international environmental experts agree with his assessment, Czechoslovakia’s neighbors know they are only slightly better off.

The problems share a common cause--the Stalinist model of economic development that demanded rapid growth of heavy industry and made no provision for environmental concerns. The results of this strategy can be found across the region.

“They’re using 19th-Century technology and 19th-Century environmental techniques,” says Jancar.

The most seriously damaged part of the region is a belt of heavy industry, coal mines and environmental devastation that stretches across three nations, from the East German province of Saxony into Czechoslovakia’s northern Bohemia--where Teplice sits--and on into Polish Silesia.

In the Silesian city of Krakow, about 300 miles east of Teplice, an endless row of smokestacks on the roofs of the aged Lenin Steel Mill complex daily belch 10,000 tons of noxious gases and other effluents into the polluted skies, helping to create what Stanislaw Garlicki, director of the regional environmental health agency, calls an “environmental disaster.”

Krakow’s sister city, Katowice, contains what may be the most massive concentration of heavy industry in Europe--an estimated 50 square miles of tightly jammed steel mills, power plants, metal-manufacturing factories and coal mines. Environmental precautions are virtually nonexistent. Almost all the mills use technology that dates back to the late 1940s, when the Communist government took over in Poland.

The Vistula River, which flows from the Upper Silesian Hills just south of Krakow on through Warsaw to the Baltic Sea, is virtually an open sewer, so heavily polluted with salt from coal-processing and other slag that it is unfit even for industrial use. It is even polluting the Baltic Sea, to the horror of Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.

International officials say an estimated 70% of Poland’s water is not drinkable.

Far to the south, in the Bulgarian city of Ruse, residents say about 80% of all young men drafted into the army show some signs of lung damage. Bulgarian officials blame a massive chemical complex built across the Danube River in Romania just upwind of their city.

High Cancer Rates

And in every major Eastern European city, fumes from burning soft coal, the dominant source of heat, suffuse the winter air with a heavy scent and a noxious haze that vanished from most Western cities decades ago. Blankets of soot cover streets from East Berlin to Sofia. The heavy use of coal, coupled with heavy smoking habits throughout the region, have helped to give Eastern Europe abnormally high rates of cancer.

Poland’s Institute of Oncology in Gliwice has identified about 18 cancer-causing agents in Polish coal that it says makes coal-burning a danger to health even during non-winter months.

Rural regions also have been badly damaged. In Czechoslovakia, environmental activists say the concentrations of pesticide and fertilizer residues frequently exceed legal limits. And residents of Prague offer repeated anecdotes of people hospitalized for acute reactions to high levels of nitrates in fruits and vegetables.

In many areas of Eastern Europe, environmental activists say, overuse of chemicals has permanently contaminated the soil. The Polish government has considered a ban on growing vegetables in parts of Silesia after soil measurements for lead, cadmium and other poisonous metals revealed some of the highest levels ever detected anywhere in the world.

Throughout the region, environmental concerns played a role in the political upheaval that appears to have brought the Communist era to a close. In Bulgaria, for example, an environmental group, Ekoglasnost, organized the first demonstrations against the regime of now-ousted Communist Party chief Todor Zhivkov.

In Czechoslovakia, opposition leaders say popular revulsion against pollution hastened the downfall of that country’s hard-line Stalinist rulers, fatally undermining the government’s claim that it had provided a decent living standard for the people even if it had curtailed political liberty.

One of the new government’s first acts was to establish an environmental agency for the first time, and the environmentalist Greens Party is given a good chance of attracting considerable support in elections scheduled for June.

In Poland, about 200 environmental groups have sprung up around the country, although all are locally oriented, without a single nationwide umbrella organization.

Despite the public concerns, however, the problems the region faces far outweigh the resources available. In Poland, where the new government has been in place the longest and has begun estimating the cost of change, environmental cleanup alone could cost well into the billions of dollars--far more than the nation’s treasury can spare.

The most hopeful scenario most East European government officials can offer is what might be called the “Pittsburgh Solution.” Governments throughout the region plan to close massive, obsolete and money-losing factories to restructure their economies. Those closures will cause difficult unemployment but will also reduce pollution, just as the shrinking of the U.S. steel industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s helped to clean the skies of western Pennsylvania.

Beyond that rather painful approach to reducing pollution, no government in Eastern Europe has yet laid plans for tackling the massive cleanup job. In Krakow, regional environmental director Garlicki admits, he doesn’t even have the measuring equipment he needs to monitor emissions.

In Teplice, officials currently monitor two pollutants--sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide--but say they will need several years to measure other problems. Toxic waste dumps are only beginning to be catalogued.

Internally, cleanup efforts have met resistance. In Krakow, for example, Garlicki’s agency wants to limit the steel mills’ production to help cut pollution in the area. But he is running into resistance from the mill managers, who contend that the economy would be hurt severely if the mill had to operate at a lower speed.

Garlicki’s colleagues across the border in Czechoslovakia face similar problems. In Teplice and other heavily polluted areas, the government pays parents to send children to camps in the mountains on weekends for breathing breaks. But when temperature inversions trap smog over the city, health officials have little power to do more than warn residents to stay indoors, said Dr. Frantisek Kotesovec of the regional health commission.

Although Teplice’s environment has improved somewhat over the past six years, the average sulfur dioxide level in the city’s air remains more than twice as high as the level international health experts consider dangerous. And during inversions, particularly common in the spring and fall, pollution levels can soar to staggeringly unhealthy amounts.

Dangerous Levels

For 12 straight days last November, for example, sulfur dioxide levels exceeded 400 micrograms per cubic meter of air--the level at which officials can order minor reductions in power plant output. Pollution peaks during that period were far above the 400 level, and that, said Kotesovec, “was not the worst, just an example.”

U.S. officials consider prolonged exposure to any sulfur dioxide levels above 80 micrograms to be dangerous to health. Short-term exposure above 365 micrograms also causes lung damage, U.S. officials say.

Similarly, the Czechoslovak government recognizes any nitrogen oxide concentrations above 100 micrograms per cubic meter as unhealthful. In November, Teplice had 22 days with concentrations above that level.

Meaningful solutions here would require massive and expensive changes in the nation’s electric energy supply system. But even less dramatic changes have been slow in coming.

The regional government, for example, will pay to lay gas pipelines to houses so residents can stop using sulfur-laden soft coal. But the residents must pay for new furnaces and gas lines inside their homes--and the price tag is nearly three-quarters of a factory worker’s average annual pay.