Europe The Bills Come Due

What price freedom? The question on the lips of East Europeans a year ago seemed to have been answered when communist dictatorships gave way one after another without offering more than token resistance. The startling disintegration of the East bloc registered a 7, maybe an 8, on a Richter scale of this century's most significant events, yet the bill for half a dozen revolutions seemed exceedingly modest. The cost of erasing the 45-year-old political division of Europe and opening the way toward democratic pluralism and free-market economies: a few hundred killed, mainly in Romania.

One year later, as elected governments from the Baltic to the Black Sea struggle with the complexities of democracy and the harsh realities of the marketplace, often hampered by old demons like nationalism and populism, an awareness is growing that the full dues have yet to be paid. Whatever the sacrifices made over the past 12 months -- or the preceding four decades of communist rule -- citizens in every liberated East European nation are acknowledging that those were merely small down payments on freedom.

Since the revolutions of 1989, all the region's countries have had democratic, or at least partially free, elections, and all have pledged to abandon command economies for the free market. But while small-scale capitalism is beginning to take root, no country has yet attempted to privatize the thousands of large-scale industries in the portfolios of state- owned business. In some countries an entrenched communist nomenklatura is hanging on to as much economic power as it can; in others, both government and opposition are so riven by disagreements that day-to-day administration seems to be coming apart. Says George Karasimeonov, a political science professor at Sofia University: "We have experienced the birth of democracy, but democracy has not yet created its own institutions and traditions."

East Europeans are now worrying about jobs, rising prices, their very futures. Some are looking for scapegoats, turning on minorities and seeking retribution from former communists. Others are looking for solace in nationalism or embracing populist politicians who gloss over the level of pain that will accompany the transition to market economies. "These are difficult times everywhere," says Chris Mattheisen of K.M. Associates, an independent consultancy group in Budapest. "People are freer but a lot more insecure."

Compounding the difficulties for Eastern Europe is political unrest and economic chaos in the Soviet Union as well as, farther away, the conflict in the Persian Gulf. Turmoil in the Middle East has pushed up oil prices and curtailed world markets at the very moment when the Soviet Union, still the East Europeans' major trading partner, has cut back sharply on oil deliveries to its former allies and reduced its purchases of their goods. In Hungary angry motorists have blockaded roads and bridges; in Bulgaria the government has been forced to order sharp cuts in the power supply. The oil crisis has made it impossible to shut down Soviet-built nuclear reactors in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia that Western experts consider unsafe. "The gulf crisis couldn't have come at a worse time for Eastern Europe," says Daniel Thorniley, an analyst at Business Eastern Europe, a consulting agency in Vienna. "It has raised costs and diverted Western attention away from the area."