COLUMN ONE : E. Europe Arrests the Police State : Communism is gone, but the huge security forces it spawned remain as a deadly legacy for the newly free governments of the East Bloc.

Communism in Eastern Europe may have failed in most ways, but in one respect its success was undisputed: It produced some of the most comprehensive, efficient secret police networks in modern times.

Dismantling them looms as one of the most formidable challenges facing the region’s newly free governments.

Murky, aloof and left remarkably intact by the sudden collapse of their Marxist creators and masters, the secret police apparatuses of Eastern Europe remain rogue institutional time bombs that inexperienced interim governments spent weeks trying to unearth before starting the delicate job of defusing them.

In numbers alone, the problem is huge.

East Germany’s dreaded Ministry of State Security--known to Germans as the Stasi--was the country’s second-largest employer (next to the army) and kept active files on one-third of the country’s 17 million people.

East Germans last week were reminded again how far the Stasi’s tentacles reached into their society when Wolfgang Schnur, the leader of a conservative political party and a man who made his name defending dissidents, admitted having worked with the agency.

“It was a state within a state,” conceded former East German Communist Party leader Egon Krenz.

Only in January did East Germany belatedly move to cut the Stasi’s pervasive powers by disarming its members and ordering its size cut to 10,000 from 85,000 by the end of March. An independent citizens’ committee now presides over the de facto dissolution of the apparatus, while some of the unknown hundreds of thousands blackmailed by the Stasi into informing on others have established encounter groups to try come to terms psychologically with their plight.

In Romania, the Securitate once nurtured plans to operate 10 million microphones at a time, so that “every single family could be periodically monitored during each calendar year, with suspect ones continuously covered,” Nicolae Ceausescu’s former intelligence chief, Ion Pacepa, noted in his book, “Red Horizons.”

By all accounts, the Securitate didn’t fall far short of its goal.

Moves to neutralize internal security forces are under way throughout Eastern Europe as fledgling democratic forces ponder safeguards that would prevent such a massive erosion of human rights from ever occurring again.

Only in Romania and Bulgaria, according to area specialists, is there any prospect that the secret police could recover power significantly.

Those who have monitored the collapse of Eastern Europe’s dictatorships predict that a few senior secret police officials will face trial and imprisonment as revelations of their activities are made. In Czechoslovakia, such fears have triggered a rash of suicides.

Most observers, however, discount wholesale witch hunts.

“All a nation needs is two or three big trials and then it becomes repetitive,” commented Alex Pravda, a noted Oxford University Sovietologist. “These networks are all so big and diffuse, they can’t get everyone.”

It is even possible that individuals whom the new governments consider both trustworthy and competent might be asked to help build smaller, more benign counterespionage groups, while those security figures with darker pasts are quietly retired. The vast majority, however, seem destined to search for new lives in new, more open societies.

Some have even joined the free-market spirit of the time and gone private. In Poland, Interior Ministry officials report between five and 10 applications daily from former colleagues registering to set up private detective agencies.

Frequently, however, the transition is not easy. Tomaj Barsi, chief spokesman for Hungary’s Interior Ministry, noted that more than 100 members of his country’s secret police resigned in disgust after refusing to swear allegiance to the country’s new constitution, which omits any reference to communism’s leading role.

More often, though, the animosity is from the public, now displaying flashes of anger pent up for years.

Angry East Germans have trashed the Stasi’s offices, and potential employers frequently reject an applicant if the agent’s past is discovered. One Czechoslovak groused that members of the secret police should take the janitors’ and boiler tenders’ jobs that they once forced on political opponents as the price of dissent.

“At this point, emotions are running so high, nobody wants them at all,” commented one Prague resident.

While anger is dominant, there is also a distinct fear remaining among the generations who have known no walls without ears and still glance instinctively over their shoulders. It was members of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, who first established Eastern Europe’s pervasive internal security networks in the late 1940s and early 1950s and stayed on, first as advisers, then as liaison officers, to keep tabs on their proteges.

Until their collapse, these networks generated the fear that made them communism’s prime instruments of power.

The ruthless, bloody defense of the totalitarian state mounted by Romania’s Securitate may have been the exception in the otherwise peaceful collapse of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, but it is also a lingering nightmare of what could have happened elsewhere. And, so long as there are remnants of these security networks, the region’s new governments will remain jittery.

In Czechoslovakia, rumors of a security police-led coup so paralyzed routine activity in Prague that Interior Minister Richard Sacher simply abolished the country’s 18,000-strong secret police apparatus, ordered its agents to stay home during the day, then led reporters on a tour of the empty headquarters buildings.

“Members of these departments have ceased all functions,” Sacher declared, as the civilian police tried desperately to take over rudimentary internal security tasks.

In Bulgaria, Communist Interior Minister Atanas Semerdziev announced on national television in February that the country’s secret police had been disbanded, and he signed a declaration that opposition offices and telephones were no longer tapped.

There is evidence that this public nervousness was warranted.

Two months after Erich Honecker’s neo-Stalinist regime fell in East Berlin, Stasi agents were still hard at work bugging political activists. And nearly a year after Hungary formally severed secret police links with the Communist Party and ended the political role of the police, agents were discovered reporting on opposition political meetings. That affair triggered the resignation of Hungary’s interior minister and the chief of internal security and led to a parliamentary investigation.

“These people just went on doing what they’d always done, and no one stopped them,” said G. M. Tamas, an opposition member of the Hungarian Parliament and one of those investigating the scandal.

Despite these incidents, area specialists believe the greatest threat to stability from old-guard secret police remains in Romania, where uncertainty about the Securitate hangs like a dark cloud over the country’s democratic future.

The Bulgarian Communist Party’s continued power has also unsettled people in that country, who fear a possible secret police revival despite government pledges to the contrary.

But, with a string of democratic elections on the horizon, the notion has begun to dawn that it would require more than a handful of disenchanted security police officers to reverse the tidal wave of change that has swept through the region.

Combining to reduce the threat, according to those familiar with the region, are the severing of Communist Party ties with the security police, the upcoming elections and the lack of support, either within the military establishments or among popular politicians, for short-circuiting the path toward democracy.

“For a putsch (uprising) to succeed, you need political figures and the army,” said Vladimir Kusin, a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe in Munich who recently compiled a status report on secret police groups in Eastern Europe. “Those conditions don’t exist in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or East Germany. In whose name? For what purpose? There may be a desperado or two, but not more.”

Added Hungarian lawmaker Tamas, a former dissident and target of secret police harassment: “I’m not afraid any more; I’m really not. Who is going to risk something like that (a coup attempt)?”

Although every country maintains some form of internal security organization (in the United States it is the FBI), several factors point to smaller and more benign counterintelligence corps: a softening political climate, strong public resistance and the fact that funds for secret police work will likely have to be defended in the newly elected parliaments of financially strapped Eastern Europe.

“The dissidents are now in the government; our enemies are now our friends,” summed up Tamas. “A big security force will be hard to justify.”

East German Communist Prime Minister Hans Modrow found that out the hard way in January. His attempt to justify a large new internal security force to combat neo-Nazi activities so enraged and dismayed his country’s citizens that he immediately dropped the idea.

Many governments in the region are only beginning to consider what democratic controls should be placed on new internal security networks. But if initial signs are an indicator, those controls will be extremely tight.

All but Romania are committed to place their revamped secret police forces under some form of parliamentary supervision.

Hungary has introduced one of the tightest systems anywhere. The secret police here must obtain the justice minister’s written permission to tap a telephone--the maximum time is 30 days. In addition, after the tap is removed, the justice minister will report to Parliament the names of those bugged. If no evidence for prosecution is uncovered, the secret police can be sued by the target of its surveillance for violation of rights.

“We need a system far stricter than those in well-established democracies,” Tamas insisted. “We have to watch our step.”

Among the nations fresh out of dictatorship, only Romania has done little to dismantle its secret police. The ruling National Salvation Front has placed the Securitate under military control, but there is little evidence that Ceausescu’s private army is a spent force.

Reflecting mounting unease in Bucharest, a group of 46 prominent intellectuals recently signed an open letter contending that the Securitate still holds considerable power. They demanded that the government back up its claims that telephone tapping and other surveillance have stopped by publicly destroying the Securitate’s centers.

“Can we talk about the victory of the revolution when fear, physical and psychological threats go on?” they asked.

Hungary’s Tamas, who was born and raised in the Romanian city of Cluj, recalled his own experience during a trip to his old hometown that provided a hint of the Securitate’s grip on power.

Tamas recounted how, shortly after the new year, a Securitate major who had interrogated him years before suddenly telephoned from a local prison where he faced a possible trial. The major wanted to know if Tamas would testify that he had not been physically tortured during his interrogation--a point that Tamas indicated he would be willing to confirm.

“An hour later, he phoned again, asking if I would agree to accept a case of French champagne with his compliments,” Tamas said. “French champagne. In Romania. Ordered from a jail cell.

“That’s influence.”