COLUMN ONE : Fears Haunt the Brave New World : After years of state control, the hardships and uncertainty of reform have Eastern Europeans looking to the future with doubt and dread.

The flatiron colors of winter roll on through village and hamlet, across the still fields and stands of forest, a landscape unaltered by the year of change in Eastern Europe.

The roads are lined with poplars, their wet limbs bare and black. The countryside settlements of East Slovakia, some of them hundreds of years old, are dumpy, wooden and as still as the fog hanging over the snowfields. The barnyards are cluttered--rusted implements, firewood, spavined wagons, muddy ruts-- and watched over by foraging poultry and chained dogs. It cannot have looked much different 100 years ago.

And then, approaching through fog thickened by coal smoke, there is Kosice, its industrial stacks ghostly in the murk. Like most of the sizable cities of East Slovakia, if not all of Eastern Europe, this is a factory town, a Communist monument to blast furnaces and heavy-equipment manufacture, to the primacy of the worker in the workers’ state.

The workers, a year after the revolution, are terrified. As the surrounding countryside seems frozen in time, the people of the cities, through much of Eastern Europe, seem paralyzed as well. As the past crumbles beneath them, the future is a vast question mark, and almost all the news is bad.

A lengthy journey by car through Eastern Europe, through its back roads and its capitals, leaves the overwhelming impression of unease and uncertainty. With a few notable exceptions, a kind of stillness prevails over much of the area, as though it were stalled on the rails and listening to the distant rumble of deliverance or, more likely, disaster approaching down the tracks.

In Prague, the politicians argue over the speed of adopting a market economy, when and how to privatize a state-run industrial base, how sharply to devalue the currency and move toward full convertibility.

In Kosice, whatever decision they make in Prague, it will all come too fast for comfort.

A year after the revolution, says Julius Kupsak, a senior editor of the Kosice daily paper, Vyhod Slovenski, “people can speak freely. You can travel where you want. But it is hard to talk about improvement in our material life, and it is hard to see how it can get better.”

The editor’s observations are widely echoed through Eastern Europe this winter. Only in Poland is the general mood more buoyant, and even there the optimism is far from universal.

What is going on now in most of Eastern Europe is a different kind of awakening from the one the world celebrated in 1989. Now, as though rousing themselves from a long, drugged slumber, the people are looking around and discovering how bad things really are, how far they have fallen behind and how painful it will be before there is even a start at catching up.

Another realization also reluctantly dawns as people gradually recognize the depth of the psychological dependency they inherited from 45 years of state control. The state may have been scoffed at, subverted and generally held in contempt, but it did everything--provided the housing, the jobs, the goods. It provided its heavy-handed brand of security. It set the prices, ensured the public order and granted permission . . . for everything. Now, when everything is possible (at least in theory), it is hard to know how or where to start to think for one’s self.

On the streets of cities like Kosice, and scores of other smaller towns, the worry is evident in the clenched faces of factory workers and housewives, bending down to peer at the prices in shop windows and meat markets, transfixed as if the numbers were rising before their eyes.

Even the young find their resilience, their adaptability and imagination strained.

Jan Tomas, 26, is a freshly graduated veterinarian, employed at the university in Kosice. Often, on weekends, he journeys to the resort area of the Tatra Mountains in northern Slovakia, where he sidles up to tourists who might have hard currency and offers to change money. His offering is a little better than the bank rates and not as good as that offered by the Gypsies who hang around the lobby and the front door of the Tatra Hotel back in Kosice and change money in wholesale lots. In this narrow gap is his profit.

It isn’t much, but it supplements the salary he gets from the university, the equivalent of roughly $100 a month. He is saving his money, but he is not sure for what. He is single and the thought of marrying, even if he had a candidate in mind, is a decision that seems less emotional than financial. His head is a catalogue of rising prices. A washing machine, he notes, costs 7,500 crowns, three times his monthly salary, and the prices are just beginning to go up.

“If you want to have a family,” he said, “it’s a big problem. You have to have a refrigerator. If you have children, you have to have a washing machine.”

Like virtually all his contemporaries, he has nothing but contempt for the “Commies,” but the radical reform proposals being enacted by the Czechoslovak finance minister, Vaclav Klaus, frighten him.

“This strong capitalistic system is not good for people,” he said. “I have a friend who works in a bank, and he thinks within a few months Klaus will be out.”

Tomas pins his hopes on the influence of President Vaclav Havel, who prefers a slower and, he hopes, less painful route to economic reform. The national debate is heated, but so far Klaus and his accelerated program have the upper hand.

Tomas and his friends are unsure how to face this future, but he and some of his acquaintances would welcome the chance to leave, to move to Canada or the United States. In effect, they would rather opt out than stay and try to make the coming system work for them.

One of his veterinary school colleagues, Jana Struharikova, works in a laboratory at the university. On the side, she earns a few crowns a month treating dogs and cats, the pets of friends. It is all unofficial, business done by word of mouth, her fees small and whimsical. “Sometimes I’m just returning a favor,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t charge anything.”

There are no private veterinary clinics in town, but the idea that she and Tomas might launch one seems far too complicated, too ridiculously far-fetched to have occurred to them. Suggested over lunch one day recently, the notion brought a momentary glimmer of interest, then a cascade of reasons explaining its impossibility.

“What would we do for an office?” Struharikova said. “First of all, we wouldn’t be able to find one, and then, if we did, we couldn’t pay the rent.”

“And we have no equipment,” Tomas said. “No bank would give us a loan.”

“No medicines,” Struharikova added.

“And we don’t have a license for private clinic.” The state’s machinery for issuing licenses, Tomas went on, is a bureaucratic tangle, and there’s no telling when it would be sorted out.

Struharikova and Tomas could sense constraints, instinctively, at every turn. To an outsider, probing for a way around the roadblocks, they were politely indulgent but firm; there was no way.

That is the striking difference, these days, between Poland and much of the rest of Eastern Europe. To be sure, there are pockets of desperation and deep gloom in parts of Poland. In the textile mills and clothing factories of Lodz, for example, hard hit by shrinking markets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, looms have gone idle in some cases, and unemployment is rising. But the national mood, on the whole, is strikingly upbeat.

Above all, there is a sense of movement in Poland, a feeling on the part of thousands of fledgling entrepreneurs that anything is possible, given energy and an idea. Having weathered the hard shock of removing price controls and establishing a convertible currency--steps still not fully implemented in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and even further delayed in Romania and Bulgaria--the Poles have taken a quantum leap beyond their neighbors and have found, often to their own surprise, that it was less horrific than predicted.

It is a lesson the rest of the region is reluctant to absorb. Poland, say Czechoslovaks and Hungarians, was a special case. “The Poles started so far behind us that they had no choice,” said a minor government official in Hungary who is trying, on the side, to set up a property investment firm.

This prospective developer, like many of his kind in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, subscribes to the theory that the government would collapse, factories would close overnight and strikes would paralyze the country if the national currency were made convertible in a stroke, as it was in Poland last January.

“We in Hungary have been living beyond our means for a long time, longer than the Poles, and I don’t think we could take that kind of shock,” the Hungarian said. As evidence, he points to the chaos that ensued after the government raised gasoline prices some weeks ago. Protesting taxi drivers blocked bridges and threw Budapest and an indecisive government into days of ludicrous crisis.

The debate between the crash economic reformists and those advocating a gentler approach has been far more evenly matched in Czechoslovakia and Hungary than in Poland, and at least some of the effects are evident in the paralysis of Czechoslovaks and the hesitancy of the Hungarians.

A pointed and poignant example is available in Koprivice, Czechoslovakia, where about 1,000 workers and a score of dejected management personnel produce the Tatra automobile.

The Tatra has a wondrous history, its antecedents extending back to the original wagon factory established in Koprivice in the 1880s and extending through the design, in the 1930s, of the world’s first air-cooled, rear-engine, streamlined automobile--the direct precursor, in fact, of the Volkswagen Beetle. Under Communist direction after World War II, the factory halted the production of cars in favor of heavy trucks. In secret, however, its proud automobile designers produced a car so sleek that Czechoslovakia’s Communist bosses decided to allow production of the car--but only for the use of the Communist elite.

From 1963, Tatra workers began to produce cars for the exclusive use of Communist officials, and, in time, directors of state-run factories. It was impossible for an ordinary citizen, even if he had the money, to buy one. Only used Tatras found their way onto the open market, and they were often bought by taxi drivers or by foreign car buffs.

The car’s gleaming black lacquer (the authorities permitted no other color) naturally enough became a symbol of oppression and official privilege. Some might admire that it was essentially handmade in a

production schedule of no more than about 500 a year. And it might have been the nearest thing the Communist world had to a luxury car, but however plush its interior, it was indelibly stained by Communist backsides.

After the revolution, at the end of 1989, orders for the Tatra stopped cold. Factory managers who had ordered them--and who had been calling the Tatra plant regularly to check on delivery dates--called back and canceled. The unkindest cut of all came when President Havel refused to use one, even a new one with perhaps a more up-to-date color than Communist black, and chose a BMW instead.

“This was an unimaginable, terrible thing for us,” said Karel Rosenkranz, director of the Tatra museum. “Can you imagine the president of the country refusing to use the best car that his country produces?”

Orders dropped from around 500 to 150, and deep gloom set in. By now, things have improved, but there are serious fears that the Tatra’s days are numbered. The plant is producing 500 standard black versions for North Korea. Another 100 are on order from the Soviets, and the Hungarians have bought some. But word is circulating through management ranks that the payment is uncertain, and, in any case, how much future can there be in manufacturing cars for the steadily dwindling number of Communist governments?

The new factory manager, Miroslav Fucik, seems to offer little comfort to the old hands in the plant. Asked to describe the attributes of the car, he first noted: “Well, it carried some of the finest Communist asses in the East Bloc.”

Pressed further, he adds that “it is hard to talk about its strong points when you know its shortcomings.”

It is too heavy, he notes. It cannot be marketed in the West without an engine redesign incorporating modern emission controls. Its interior is uncomfortable, its instrument panel badly placed and even the famous paint job is lacking. “In the West,” he said, “you can get any color you want and the paint is guaranteed for six years. Our paint isn’t that good.”

This is reality, perhaps, but it is harsh and demoralizing. Fucik has not made his views known in a speech to the factory floor, but the word has seeped down.

Zdenek Kalinec, a deputy manager who has worked for the plant for 26 years, hears of the boss’s message with dejection and walks down the hall, shaking his head and muttering to himself. For the fullness of his career, as he sees it, he has been dedicated to making a thing of excellence, or as much excellence as the system would allow. Now it all seems on the verge of collapse. Indeed, in this moment of frustration, he seems close to tears.

“We are aware that the car is of an older conception, and to redesign it would cost a lot of money,” he said. “But 88% of the people here are convinced that it is not time to stop making this car. We have put in a life here.”