East Europe Steeped in Pessimism, Gallup Finds : Poll: The U.S. organization’s first year-end survey in the region finds Poles, Yugoslavs are the most hopeful.

The first Gallup year-end survey of Eastern Europe reveals a region steeped in pessimism, with those who have the highest living standards most worried about seeing them erode in 1991.

Hungarians of all income levels deemed 1990 a setback for the prosperity of their nation as well as their households, and Czechoslovaks were close behind in rating the past year as one replete with hardship, according to results released Monday by Gallup Hungary.

The former Communist countries were included in the global public opinion survey for the first time this year, and the regional findings reflect an atmosphere of despair and disorder that has emerged in communism’s wake.

Romania had to be dropped from the sample because pollsters abandoned their work in mid-December to take part in nationwide strikes and protests against the government, said Robert Manchin, a vice president of the Princeton, N.J.-based polling organization and director of Gallup’s Hungarian subsidiary, which opened in March.

However, Gallup’s regional surveyors managed to compile opinion profiles for Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Yugoslavia, based on interviews with about 1,000 randomly selected citizens in each of the countries.

Surprisingly, Hungarians and Czechoslovaks, who enjoy markedly higher standards of living than their East European neighbors, gave the bleakest forecasts for 1991.

The poll indicated that 84% of Hungarians expect 1991 to be worse than the past year, with 78% of Czechoslovaks predicting an economic downturn. About 49% of Bulgarians said the coming year would worsen their circumstances, while only 21% of Yugoslavs and 17% of Poles in the survey said 1991 would be worse.

Within the Yugoslav responses, there was a sharp division between the southern and northern republics, with Serbians decidedly more optimistic about 1991 than residents of the more prosperous republics of Slovenia and Croatia.

Manchin pointed out what he called a “cultural factor,” with the nations that were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire measurably more pessimistic than East Europeans of the Balkan and northern areas.

“I wouldn’t call it pessimism--I’d call it realism,” observed Manchin, a sociologist and former University of Wisconsin professor. “The people of this region are better informed and have a better grasp of what a market economy means.”

All the nations of Eastern Europe have embarked on the difficult transition from centralized planning to market economies. So far, that has meant higher prices for food, energy and housing, while the benefits of boosted industrial output and stronger trade have not yet appeared.

Hungarians, Bulgarians, Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs all said their personal financial situations had deteriorated in 1990, but they reported the national decline as even more severe. Of the Poles surveyed, however, 58% said their own households were worse off than a year ago, while only 41% said Poland had suffered economic setbacks.

“You must bear in mind that both countries had already gone through economic turbulence before 1990,” Manchin said of Poland and Yugoslavia. Thus, he said, they are “at least psychologically . . . on a comparative upswing.”

Manchin described the Yugoslav optimism as odd, in view of the political pressures threatening to dissolve the federation of six republics or plunge its fractious ethnic groups into civil war.

He attributed the relative optimism in Serbia and Poland to the promises of imminent prosperity made during recent presidential election campaigns in both states.

Strikes and unemployment are already on the rise throughout Eastern Europe, as evidenced by the failure of Romanians to deliver their survey results on time, and the vast majority of people in the region expect those disruptions to get worse in 1991.

On an optimist-pessimist scale developed by Manchin, his fellow Hungarians ranked the lowest of 25 nations charted, with -89.1 points on the scale ranging from 100 down to -100. Czechoslovaks were only marginally less gloomy, earning -83.3 points, followed by Bulgarians with -27, Poles with 19.5 and Yugoslavs with 38.

Before the democratic revolutions of 1989, opinion research in Eastern Europe was limited and its reported results highly unreliable because of political pressure on respondents and Communist leaders’ misuse of statistics to further their ideological causes.