EUROPE: FIVE YEARS LATER : Vaslui, Romania : Hammer and Cycle of Desperation : Mistrust, manipulation and defeatism thwart the quest for a better life after the ravages of communism.

In a paneled office high above the whining lathes and deafening compressors of the Moldova Mechanical Enterprise, Director Gigi Tiplea oscillates nervously in his swivel chair and narrows his eyes with suspicion.

He is discomfited by questions about the shrinking staff and flagging output of the cavernous workshops that sprawl across hundreds of acres, a dehumanizing monument to Eastern Europe’s Communist-era obsession with development on a Gargantuan scale.

“Why do you need to know such details?” he demands of a reporter who has come to gauge the course of change in this proletarian bastion after Eastern Europe’s bloodiest overthrow of a Communist regime five years ago.

Tiplea grudgingly discloses that 4,000 workers have been laid off from his failing enterprise, still Vaslui’s biggest employer, and that most of the remaining 2,000 would also have to go if he was forced to live within a budget.

When the talk turns to plans for the future and prospects for foreign investment, the director explodes into a fit of paranoia.

“Don’t think we don’t know what security service you work for!” Tiplea suddenly bellows at his visitor, whipping open a drawer and brandishing a letter.

The single-page missive in poor English, purported to be from a trading company in Nigeria, might indeed have been a crude provocation from what remains of Romania’s once-omnipotent Securitate secret police. The months-old letter seems to be enticing the factory boss to take part in some sort of scam.

But what it had to do with a discussion of how Vaslui has deteriorated from an industrial stronghold to the depths of despair was unclear to the journalist, and indeed to Tiplea himself.

Accusation is a skillful evasion technique, in the doctrine of former Communists, even if all that is being avoided is a discussion of the cruelties of fate. Fear of change, suspicion of foreigners and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge failings are reactions as natural as breathing for those who learned the skills of survival behind the Iron Curtain.

Despite having thrown off hard-line communism five years ago, millions of workers and managers in the region--people like Tiplea--remain locked in a time warp, indoctrinated in the adversarial politics of a bygone era and seemingly incapable of learning another way.

In places such as Vaslui, where the quest for a better life after the ravages of communism has gone horribly wrong, people remain stuck in a rut of mistrust, manipulation and defeatism that sabotages every inclination toward reform.

Unemployment here is officially 37% and in reality much higher, as most surviving factories have no product orders and have sent their employees on indefinite leave.

Many of the 80,000 people who lived in Vaslui five years ago have fled abroad or to other areas of Romania, leaving the dark, decaying workers’ apartment blocks half-empty.

The entire town, built up from nothing a quarter of a century ago on the parched plains of Moldova, has the look of having been used up and discarded. Broken windows and unlit corridors give even working factories an abandoned appearance. Street lights and traffic signals were long ago turned off to save electricity. Gas prices of about $1 a gallon might be considered a bargain elsewhere in Europe, but in Vaslui most cars have been garaged or left in yards for children to play in. Streets are empty but for pedestrians and groaning buses.

The most depressed town in the poorest region of arguably the most devastated country of the former East Bloc, Vaslui typifies the tragedy of Stalinist experiments that toyed with a society’s natural order.

The late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu created dozens of towns like this one in the late 1960s and 1970s when he herded farmers into cities to work in factories in a fevered quest for mass industrialization. Vaslui was transformed in a few short months of 1970 from a sleepy village of woodworkers into a monolithic company town, complete with shabby, prefabricated high-rises thrown up in haste for the workers forcibly moved out of the fields and forests.

“The idea was that each county would be raised to a high level of development by the location of a major industry in its central town,” explains Pompiliu Sirghe, local liaison with the national Ministry of Labor and one of many political survivors from the apparatus built by Ceausescu.

The overnight buildup succeeded in providing a subsistence living for Vaslui laborers, but only so long as the closed circle of the Moscow-led Comecon trading alliance assured a market for even the shoddiest goods.

The Vaslui cog in the pre-revolutionary wheel of East Bloc industry produced mostly extraction and ventilation equipment for mining--a sector of the economy that has fallen on particularly bad times and taken its provincial suppliers down with it.

Today, Vaslui’s laid-off masses might be said to be free to return to the countryside. But one lesson of dictatorship everyone seems to have learned well is that nothing good ever comes from taking charge or taking chances.

The migrations broke the bond between land and peasant and stripped workers of all initiative, pounding home the message that they had no power over their own futures.

Liliana Codrescu has been without work since a local textile plant cut half of its work force a few months after the revolution. The collapse of Comecon meant supplies of cheap cotton from Central Asian republics were no longer forthcoming, and the fabric factory was having trouble finding buyers for its slipshod wares.

Codrescu, 39, is widowed with two children and gets a $15-a-month death benefit from her late husband’s employer. The pittance paid by the Romanian government to its jobless expired a year ago, and Codrescu is the first to admit that prospects of being called back to the textile plant are nil.

But the thin, sullen woman shrugs helplessly when asked how she’ll manage.

“I don’t know,” she says, sighing morosely. “Maybe we will all starve.”

Her 20-year-old daughter, Loredana, was lured to Cyprus over the summer with a thirdhand promise of a hotel maid’s job. She returned home in September with shoes and coats for her brother and mother, some gold jewelry, expensive lingerie and a silent determination not to go back.

“We don’t ask what she did there,” says neighbor Eugenia Stefanescu with a knowing yet sympathetic look. “She brought back some sneakers for my Michaela, which God knows she needed, but I don’t like to think about where they came from.”

Stefanescu, also a widow and heading into a five-month season of being unemployed when the dairy she works at closes for winter, fears mostly for her own pretty daughter, who has no prospects of finding work when she finishes her last year of high school in the spring.

“My mother has land in the countryside. We could go back there and at least know we would eat. But I have no experience with that kind of work, and neither does Michaela,” says Stefanescu, who earns about $22 a month at the dairy and must help out two adult sons whose jobs at Moldova Mechanical have disappeared.

Huddled in the dark of the Codrescu apartment, where there is neither a working light bulb nor the 400 lei (23 cents) needed to buy one, the families fritter away their idle evenings bemoaning the pitfalls of change and imagining what more might go wrong.

“I would like to work in a private shop that sells makeup or dresses. But no owner will hire me unless I have 100,000 lei to kick into the business,” says Loredana, citing a sum of less than $60 but one that might as well be a million in a household that can’t muster 23 cents.

While Romania’s casualties of economic transition have a tendency to see doom in every venture, a conspicuous mafia of local hucksters does appear to have an exclusive lock on private business.

“It’s impossible to do anything here. Those with connections control everything,” insists Eugen Sacaleanu, who two years ago slipped illegally across the Hungarian and Austrian borders to get to Italy, where he earns more than $1,000 each month as a waiter. “I wouldn’t live here again for anything. Even with money I wouldn’t succeed. I’ve just come to get my wife and daughter.”

That there is no future worth working for here is a conclusion drawn by frightening numbers of Romanians, who make up a hefty share of the illegal immigrant populations in most West European countries.

With no feel for the land, no concept of service and little chance of success in commerce, most unemployed workers have grown accustomed to their role as reform’s victims. The few with initiative, such as Sacaleanu, have given up on their homeland and voted with their feet.

The pervasive fatalism stems largely from the Communist era, when Ceausescu’s maniacal drive for a Greater Romania dictated every decision for the people, from what they should eat to the number of children each woman should bear.

But Vaslui’s mayor, Victor Cristea, also invokes eastern Romania’s history of Russian and Turkish occupation in explaining why the local population seems paralyzed by expectations of defeat.

“We have a different mentality than the Romanians who live in Transylvania, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for centuries,” he says. “The Hapsburg occupiers imposed civilization and culture, while those who came here only took away what they could. That is why we feel disadvantaged. People have always been afraid to build anything here. They think it will only be taken away.”

Unable to make the broken machinery of a command economy work anymore and unwilling to risk building another system, those in positions of authority in basket-case towns such as Vaslui resort to the knee-jerk Communist practice of denying reality.

“The type of products we make here will be needed in the future. These are just transitional difficulties,” insists Tiplea.

Laid-off workers who still live here continue to show up for monthly discussions about the prospects for a return to their jobs, undeterred by the consistent message that there is no relief on the horizon.

Impoverished both financially and spiritually, the resentful victims of Romania’s stalled transformation say they are nostalgic for the days of dictatorship, preferring the vague ache in their souls induced by repression to the sharp pain of hunger now felt in their stomachs.

“I wish the revolution never happened,” says Michaela Stefanescu, who was 12 when Ceausescu was toppled. “Maybe we didn’t have a lot of freedom then, but now we don’t have enough food, and you’re not safe on the streets. Young people have nothing to look forward to. We just stay inside and worry about how we’ll survive tomorrow.”