Specter of Soviet Past Still Haunting Eastern Europe : New democracies: Many fear an invasion, and that Moscow’s woes will spill over their borders, survey finds.

The former Communist Party official was blunt and grave about his fears:

“All signs point to a strong military dictatorship emerging in the Soviet Union,” he said. “Not only is Hungary afraid of this, but all the other countries of this region are afraid of this as well.”

A politician in Budapest agreed. “The old empire still exists over there (in the Soviet Union),” he warned, “and it is still possible their military will appear on our horizon, possibly bringing back the old regimes in East Europe. This could be our 1991 nightmare.”

Not just in Hungary but in Poland and Czechoslovakia as well, the specter of the Soviet past is sending fear sweeping across Eastern Europe.

While the West is still sighing with relief over the end of the Cold War, the emerging East European democracies are apprehensive. The Soviet Union--racked by its own internal problems, and involved in a crackdown in Lithuania and Latvia--is still “a menacing power,” as a Hungarian stagehand put it.

Not only do the East Europeans fear a second round of Red Army invasions of their countries, but they also have nightmares that the Soviet Union’s problems will spill over across their borders.

Among their biggest worries: that Soviet troops will remain in their countries indefinitely, that chaos in the Soviet Union will send refugees flooding into the former satellites--even that economic collapse in the Soviet Union will destroy lucrative markets for shoddy East European goods.

These fears were the surprising themes of conversations with more than 100 men and women in these former Soviet satellites and in the former East Germany, conducted in connection with an extensive survey of the region by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press.

“In everyday life,” a transport worker said flatly in Kosice, the Slovak city closest to the Soviet Union, “people still consider the Soviet Union a menacing power.”

“I’m afraid that there are plenty of communists still here who want to return to power,” said a Prague medical student, “and I hate, I just hate, the idea that the Soviet army is still here.”

“There are Soviet generals who would like to return here,” added a Czech mathematician. “Right now they’ve got other problems, but later. . . .”

In the far reaches of these emerging democracies of Middle Europe, where storks still nest in chimneys and where the 20th Century is acknowledged only in the incongruous rubber tires on horse-drawn wagons, the people see no reason to be sanguine about the Soviet bear next door.

“We’re living in a dark house,” said a Slovak worker. “Everybody’s afraid.”

“The West is blind to this Soviet threat,” complained a middle-aged schoolteacher in Krakow, Poland. The danger might be even greater because of Soviet instability than at the height of the Cold War when the Soviets were more secure internally, she said.

“I never believed the Russians,” she added bitterly. “They have always been treacherous and expansionist.”

“I had thought differently,” added a graduate student at Krakow’s 14th-Century Jangiellonian University, where Copernicus mused about the solar system. “But now, after (the Soviet crackdowns in) Lithuania and Latvia, I am also again afraid of the Russians.”

So intense was the emotion when 14 people were killed as special “black beret” troops seized a Lithuanian television station Jan. 13 that the door of the Soviet consulate in Krakow was doused in kerosene and set ablaze by some in a group of thousands of protesting university students.

“After that, (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev is finished,” said a Krakow architect. Nine others sitting around him nodded vigorous agreement with that judgment. “He hasn’t been leading the Soviet Union for a long time now,” someone chimed in.

Only in Dresden, in the former East Germany, was the Soviet military threat muted.

“We are now part of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization),” explained a member of the newly elected all-German Parliament. The U.S.-backed alliance, he implied, would protect East Germans from Moscow as it has West Germans.

“Our fear,” added a local priest, “is that if the Soviet borders are opened, the risk to Germany and our economic situation will come from refugees flooding across.” This reflected the East German inclination to view unification primarily in economic terms.

There are rumors that millions--even 20 million--Russians and Ukrainians will leave, others said. “It will be impossible to stop them, even with the army,” said a Prague motor vehicle inspector.

A few days later, the Czechoslovak government more than doubled its army on the eastern border, and there are reports that more than 100,000 Ruthenians, who were incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine after World War II, want to rejoin Czechoslovakia.

In the East European states, the people focus on the Soviet military, particularly on the troops remaining in those countries, at least as much as on refugees.

“The most important foreign policy need is to get the Soviet troops out,” said a Krakow sociologist.

Czechoslovakia and Hungary have 20,000 to 40,000 Soviet troops inside their borders, all of whom are scheduled to go home by mid-1991. Poland has only 11,000, but they are expected to remain longer--until some 300,000 Soviet troops in East Germany travel through Poland to the Soviet Union.

A Soviet general recently said that Soviet troops will stay as long as they like, a Polish computer expert complained. “As long as the Red Army remains in Poland,” he said, “its system of penetration of the Polish government will remain.”

The peoples of East Europe do not expect anyone--either the West or their small neighbors--to come to their assistance if the Soviets return under one pretext or another.

“I distrust the West European countries,” said a Prague mathematician. “We’ve not had good experience with them,” he added, apparently in an allusion to the capitulation of Britain and France to Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“We can’t rely on anyone else, only ourselves,” echoed a Slovak laboratory technician.

Virtually no one looks to the United States for military aid either, although a former top official in the Polish foreign ministry said that the Red Army movement into Lithuania “would have been an even greater threat (to Poland) if not for the Persian Gulf.”

His words suggested that the U.S. demonstration of resolve in the Middle East might give Moscow pause before contemplating a new invasion of Poland.

“We’re a toy between the superpowers,” said an internationally known Hungarian chemist here. “It would be suicide to try to push the Soviets out now--10,000 dead, and a one-day headline for the Western press.”

“As long as there is one Soviet soldier in Hungary,” said a senior city official in Decrecen, “that is an important fact in this country.”

“But we need to work out new ties, establish new relations with the Soviets, particularly with the Ukraine,” added the official, who was imprisoned for years after the Soviet invasion of 1956. “We need Soviet markets.”

“We can only sell our second-rate products there,” said a Kosice worker. “Not in the West.”