The Seeds of a Better Future : Romania: Other East Europeans have paid in uprisings past. Now the stage is set to assign Stalinism to that dustbin of history.

The end of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime began on the morning of Dec. 16 in front of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the Transylvanian city of Timisoara.

The pastor of the congregation, the Rev. Laszlo Tokes, and his family were about to be evicted by the police and exiled to a remote village. Tokes, a human-rights advocate, chose to resist. “My church is a castle, and the castle is under siege,� he said. “It is the castle of Timisoara. Perhaps it must fall. However, if it does not fall, it may be a signal, a signal for upright Romanians.� And so it was. Around the church, a human chain of 200 parishioners soon swelled into a mass of 4,000 Orthodox Christian Romanians and Protestants. It was the massacre of this group of believers by the Securitate and these Christians’ gift of their lives on the altar of human rights that spelled the doom of Ceausescu’s bloody reign in Romania.

The secret trial and executions of Ceusescu and his wife Elena were acts of revenge and created a precedent that bodes ill for the prospects of a peaceful transition to democracy in Romania. The country is desperately poor, the people are cold and hungry. They must be fed, kept warm and prevented from unleashing a reign of terror against the Securitate and the hundreds of thousands of its former collaborators throughout Romania. The new leader, Ion Iliescu, may be, as the facile headlines have it, a “Gorbachev ally.� However, he is a Communist who may not last longer than did Egon Krenz in East Germany. Troubled times lie ahead.

Still, with all its horrors and the gruesome toll in human lives, the Romanian events carry with them seeds of a better future for the people of Eastern Europe, and perhaps the Soviet Union as well.

The luminous courage of Tokes and his supporters proved, yet again, that no force can resist an idea whose time has come. The heroism of Romanian army conscripts and that of the young people of Timisoara, Bucharest, Brasov, Arad and Sibiu remind us that freedom does not come cheap in that part of the world.

For Romania to be free, Hungarians had to die in October, 1956; tens of thousands of Czechoslovakians had to suffer imprisonment and joblessness after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968; thousands of Solidarity activists were subjected to imprisonment and torture through most of the 1980s. In the last 12 months, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian, East German and Czechoslovak citizens risked their lives on the streets of Budapest, East Berlin, Leipzig, Prague and Bratislava for their freedom and, eventually, Romania’s.

The Romanian uprising could be the last nail in the coffin of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. The still-powerful forces of the old regimes of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are now certain to face political annihilation in the forthcoming free multiparty elections in 1990. Political parties with names like “Marxist-Leninist,� “Revolutionary� and “Socialist Workers� will be swept into the dustbin of history. These will be replaced by the people’s forums--the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the East German New Forum and the Czechoslovak Citizens’ Forum.

History is being made in Eastern Europe while the United States is preoccupied with, and is occupying, Central American banana republics.

Thus far, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the leader of the other superpower, has kept his “intense personal frustrations� under control and wisely declined Washington’s knee-jerk invitation to send Soviet troops into Romania. Today the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are “Russia’s Panama.�

Instead of sending in the army to put down the rebellious Lithuanian Communists, Gorbachev is flying to Vilnius to negotiate with them. With luck, he might really earn Time magazine’s Man of the Decade honor.