East Bloc: Mercy Beats Old Ideology : Justice: Vengeance could be theirs, but the new leaders in the old Warsaw Pact prefer more oranges and working cars : to Final Truths.

RIVERSIDE — Revolutions all over Eastern Europe. Is a time of terror coming next?

Many who have suffered most are urging an end to executions, the abolition of torture. They call for forgiveness, not revenge; imprisonment for the worst evils, never death. Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel and Alexander Dubcek endured years of imprisonment and humiliation for their democratic views. Yet they will not have their enemies be killed, as the Romanians did to the Ceausescus. This is a difference worth considering. Are Havel and Dubcek saints for their forbearance, or are they only democrats?

There’s a moral to the tale, one told by the ancient tragedian Aeschylus. He wrote of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to wage the Trojan War. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, avenged her daughter’s death by murdering her husband on the day of his return. Their only son, Orestes, was obliged to kill his mother next. The avenging Furies demanded retribution after each abomination, and so the blood refused to clot.

The denouement came only when the Furies turned over the chase to the authority of law. A jury of Athenians was called upon to vote Orestes’ fate. The vote was tied. Then it became the judge’s responsibility to cast the deciding vote.

As it happened, judge Athena had no mother--she had been born directly from the head of Zeus. To Athena, matricide was no big deal and so she let Orestes off. The cycle of killing stopped, though not everyone was satisfied--an ancient irony of justice that has continued to this day.

Aeschylus’ tale of how the gods handed over the problem of justice to mere mortals is a myth. Yet there are also real morals in myth. Stories can change perspectives--in the case of Orestes, by removing justice from the realm of natural vengeance and making it into something civilized, something subject to conventions and controls. Aeschylus understood how courtroom justice can be prejudiced and flawed. But without the rule of law, vengeance transforms affairs of mortals into powers civilization can neither control nor contain. There comes a time when the killing must be stopped-- and a murderer allowed to live.

The glorious French Revolution did not see things quite that way, of course, although the guillotine was said to be an enlightened means of execution. After the Russian Revolution liberated the proletariat, many proles were victims of Josef Stalin’s pogroms. More recently, Pol Pot’s experiment in genocide followed the victory of the Khmer Rouge, with ammunition supplied by the People’s Republic of China.

The circumstances of mass executions are nearly always similar: When vengeance rises to take the place of justice, civilization is suspended. Anger or ideology displaces mercy, whether the Wrath of God motivating vengeance by the mullahs, or some final historical synthesis, in the words of Hegel, applied enthusiastically by Nazis or V.I. Lenin. The yearning for new order transcends ordinary life, offering a vision of reality and a final solution to achieve it.

Many Europeans have had enough of this transcendental metaphysics. They know what follows, all too well.

In Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland and Hungary, the revolutions have been mostly peaceful. One reason is that the revolutions are not just anti-communist but profoundly anti-ideological, spurning Final Truths for modest facts, for more oranges in the stores, vacations, rock ‘n’ roll and cars that work.

Workers in the East have not renounced communism to adopt capitalism, utilitarianism or whatever. They are not about to forgo the benefits of socialism enjoyed in Western Europe. The sweeping visions of the Age of Reason and the 19th Century are past.

This anti -philosophical rebellion is what has encouraged some East European reformers to embrace toleration and forgiveness. So the death penalty is being set aside. The Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia and its counterparts in other East European nations are not wiping the slate clean of those who won’t conform in order to make things over again. These are humble democrats who have worked their way up from farm and factory, trying to get on with life in solidarity with others, even members of the Communist Party.

Politics died in Eastern Europe long ago. Only individuals survived, because of friends and family. Consequently, there is at present little enthusiasm to invent new ideologies. The desire for revenge is natural; but the desire to get on with life is best.

Romania and Bulgaria present a more archaic view. In Bulgaria, an ethnic question transcends the existence of the state. Bulgarians fear Turks; Turks fear Bulgarians. A similar dilemma exists in Yugoslavia. A government of citizens cannot long endure the primacy of ethnic differences without ceding the rule of law to racial prejudice. We know that lesson well. And as Western Europe rushes forward to unite separate governments into one, Bulgarians and Russians face civil wars at home.

Judging from the mobs in Bucharest, Romania is singular in its apparent thirst for vengeance. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, it would seem, have given the death penalty a good name, because of the violence that preceded their downfall. The people rose up to kill the royal comrades who had defiled their own children, as Clytemnestra once had done. After years of living with neighbors who were spies, there appears precious little solidarity to get on with daily life, to civilize the Furies’ anger over the slaughter in the streets. Perhaps once the fear and anger have subsided, this, too, will change. In any case, the current temporary government has abolished the death penalty and will not put it to a vote, as the mobs demanded in the streets.

Here there remains a certain awkwardness in applauding Havel and Dubcek, anti-communists who would not kill their own oppressors. Americans who view the death penalty as appropriate revenge may themselves be locked into an ideological position--of getting even--that makes justice secondary to the interests of self. Then there are those still driven by the Furies, when incarceration of enemies can never be enough to quell the beast within. Yet current events could give death-penalty enthusiasts some pause, when they see that the nations practicing execution are fewer now and farther between, dwindling to places like the Soviet Union, China and the United States.