Power of the Pulpit : Politics: Laszlo Tokes used his role as a minister to speak against the corrupt Romanian regime. Now he speaks on behalf of Romania’s fledgling democracy.

In a quiet, old-fashioned apartment in the mid-Wilshire district, the preacher who sparked the Romanian revolution is taking a break from catching history’s treacherous waves.

Laszlo Tokes, pale, tired-looking, dark-eyed, seems to fit perfectly with the red chintz chairs, dark furniture and portrait miniatures on the walls.

But it’s soon clear that Tokes--cigarette in one hand, coffee cup in the other--is not comfortable in the past or the present, that he may be rushing toward the future faster than any media-hyped California trend-setter.

With the ouster and execution of the bizarre and megalomaniacal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December, Tokes was elevated from obscure cleric to national hero.

“Of course it changed all of my life,” he says. “My faith is the same but I could compare it to the relationship between prophecy and realization. . . . I did what I did because I believe invisible things can be made real.”

Now Tokes, 37, is working on another personal transformation--becoming a globe-trotting spokesman on the problems of embryonic democracy. He is chain-smoking his way through a mind-numbing two-week tour of the United States and Canada. For instance, he is to be in Los Angeles less than 24 hours, long enough to speak to a church gathering, grant a couple of interviews and grab a little sleep. Every interview, speech and press conference in his packed itinerary is calculated to spotlight the chronic problems of Romania, the country that suffered the bloodiest overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe last year.

In these encounters Tokes (pronounced To-kesh) appears to impress. “He’s not your typical backwoods Romanian preacher,” says Steven W. Popper, a RAND Corp. specialist in the economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, who met privately with Tokes. Popper adds that Tokes is “a very impressive guy” with “a fairly healthy sense of his place” in the events that ignited Romania.

One measure of Tokes’ new stature is his meeting with President Bush. Tokes, an ethnic Hungarian and minister of the Protestant Hungarian Reformed Church, told reporters he came away from the March 15 encounter satisfied the United States will not grant improved trade status to Romania unless the rights of Hungarians and other minorities are protected. He was also scheduled to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney last week.

Tokes’ emphasis on minority rights highlights the complex issues uncovered in the wake of Communism’s demise in the former East Bloc. Countries once perceived as monolithic totalitarian states are now clearly revealed as welters of regional and ethnic tensions.

Last week, those tensions flared into hand-to-hand fighting in the town of Tirgu Meres, where at least seven people have been killed and hundreds were wounded in clashes between ethnic Hungarians and Romanian nationalists, who are calling for the expulsion of all minorities. The violence touched off diplomatic protests by the United States and Hungary, which called upon Romania to protect its ethnic Hungarians--variously estimated at 1.7 million to 2.5 million people.

Tokes, son of a minister and one of eight children, began his rise to prominence as a voice of this Hungarian minority. And his tour of North America is sponsored by the New York-based Hungarian Human Rights Foundation.

The Hungarian church’s use of its native language and customs was anathema to Ceausescu’s regime, and the government pressured the church to install a compliant hierarchy. The suppression of the church was part of a wider crackdown waged by Ceausescu on the Hungarian population and culture.

But Tokes says his experiences in the revolution broadened his once parochial outlook. Now his most urgent role in shaping a free Romania is working for reconciliation between warring ethnic factions, he says.

Obviously, that won’t be easy.

For one thing, Tokes reportedly has been warned not to return to Romania, at least for now, because of threats on his life and the lives of other Hungarian leaders. (Given the volatile state of affairs in Romania, Tokes told a news conference in Toronto last Wednesday, he will not return until the government there can guarantee his safety. Ironically, some of Tokes’ critics lambaste him for not being sufficiently anti-communist.

Yet if his past is any indication, Tokes, who says he was called to the ministry and that his actions spring from his faith, is not likely to heed the danger signals for long. His life was repeatedly threatened in Romania while Ceausescu was in power, and he and his family were attacked in their apartment by four masked intruders last November. The disguised assailants were driven off by Tokes and two visiting friends. After the revolution, Tokes was guarded by the army for a time because of fears that die-hard Ceausescu followers would assassinate him.

Tokes’ rocket-like ascent to prominence began last Dec. 15 when supporters ringed his church in Timisoara in an attempt to protect him from arrest by Romania’s feared secret police, the securitate. As a longtime dissident, Tokes was often a target of official harassment from both church leaders and the government because he had become a master of publicizing his cause, first the preservation of Hungarian culture in the church and later outright opposition to the Ceausescu regime. Now officials were trying to remove him from the springboard of his dissent, his pulpit.

The defiance by Tokes’ followers--including some members of other churches--was unsuccessful and Tokes, his wife and 3-year-old son were deported to a remote village. But the protests in Timisoara grew and on Dec. 17 Ceausescu ordered security forces to fire on the crowds, killing as many as 3,500 people, according to a U. S. government estimate. As a result, resistance to the regime spread throughout the country. Ceausescu was overthrown when the army joined the revolt on Dec. 22. On Christmas Day, the new Romanian government announced that after a secret trial Ceausescu had been stood against a wall and shot. And Tokes, the former enemy of the state, was named to the Council of National Salvation, the coalition that now rules uneasily over a still-turbulent Romania.

Today, Tokes has gained some perspective on the events that transformed his country and himself. Although his active opposition to the Ceausescu dictatorship dates to the early 1980s, Tokes says the final round began in the fall, 1988.

It was then that Tokes went public with his opposition to Ceausescu’s plans to raze several thousand villages--including their churches, historic landmarks and cemeteries--and force residents into huge housing developments, thus destroying the cultural, spiritual and social fabric of his region of Romania.

Tokes, who often notes that the root word of Protestant is protest, wrote and circulated a petition protesting the plan. He was placed under close surveillance by the securitate and endured continuing harassment, including revocation of his ration book. Tokes, however, continued to fight back by smuggling messages about his plight out of the country and giving clandestine interviews to foreign journalists. (One illustration of the absurdist nature of Ceausescu’s government is that Tokes reportedly was billed for the threatening phone calls made to his home.)

Nonetheless, Tokes freely admits that he did not foresee a revolution. “I didn’t expect this in such a concrete form,” he explains. “I didn’t in any case think that I would have such a direct role in the fall of the regime. . . . We don’t choose historical circumstances, rather they chose us and they choose (our) historical roles.”

But he and supporters had premonitions that “something has to happen in the near future because the situation (in Romania) was unsupportable.”

Sustained by these cloudy hopes, Tokes says he counted on drawing more and more people to the anti-Ceausescu cause. “I knew from day to day, week to week there would be more and more people who will stand out, speak out,” he says, adding in simple understatement, “And so it happened.”

Well, not quite.

In an interview conducted in a mixture of Hungarian and English, Tokes at first glosses over his own role. Only when pressed does he detail his carefully crafted campaign that mixed religion with an intelligent grasp of how to use publicity and the mass media.

Perhaps most important was the fact that he was not working in a vacuum. “As a dissident only I had public support because I had my congregation,” Tokes says. “Others were solitary intellectuals, isolated. My luck was that I could not be isolated and I could make every Sunday announcements from the pulpit, sometimes as long as a sermon. I informed believers what had happened in the previous week and my church became a forum of democracy, of publicity. I told them everything about the securitate, how many times they have visited, how they threatened me.”

Tokes also was fortunate that television broadcasts from nearby Hungary could be received in his region and that other means of access to the outside world were available, including foreign visitors.

A key moment was the broadcast of an interview he had given to Canadian journalists on the Hungarian television program Panorama. Tokes credits the program with a “role in all the revolutionary movements around Hungary.”

As it did with other dissidents in other countries, the program magnified his appeal, giving the population a rallying point.

“This is something that occurred throughout Eastern Europe among the different countries where there were lone human rights advocates,” he says. “I think it can be generalized. For example, I think Vaclav Havel (now leader of Czechoslovakia) did not engineer an overthrow but through his public role succeeded in influencing the situation and anyone who was forward-looking in Czechoslovakia could group around him and gain concrete form.”

Yet in speaking of his moment of triumph last December, Tokes also recalls the cost of success.

“The victory of Timisoara, if you can call it that, was the victory of publicity on one hand and unity (against Ceausescu),” he says.

His comment about the price of revolution prompts a final question: What is his impression of America?

Without hesitation he replies, “You haven’t suffered ever as the people of Eastern and Central Europe have suffered. You have to import the suffering.”