PARIS -- Western Europe's intense preoccupation with the implications of the Treaty of Maastricht and currency relations, and U. S. preoccupation with presidential elections and the domestic economy, have virtually eclipsed concern with the ex-Soviet states and Eastern Europe.


There is a tendency to think that things must be muddling along since people aren't hearing dramatic news from the East these days, except of course the war in Yugoslavia.


This is dangerous. Some experts are aware of it and are following events closely, but they are having trouble attracting public and political attention. The grandiose plans for aid are bumbling along. Neither money nor know-how is moving with the urgency that is clearly needed.


In part, the difficulties were gravely underestimated, just as the social, economic and environmental devastation left by communism was vastly underestimated. Recent reports indicate that production of basic resources, not only oil but diamonds, gold, coal -- which ought to be the reliable export earners -- continues to deteriorate as the result of long abusive exploitation and lack of investment.


The one flow from West to East which is abundant is advisers, who drop in for a week or so, expound, and disappear, ceding their place to a new group which often as not offers contradictory suggestions. This is true not only in Russia. A colleague reports that Bulgaria, which has deficient nuclear reactors on the verge of turning into a new Chernobyl, has already received 64 different missions to study the problem. Nothing has been done. The money and the essential alternative energy supplies aren't available.


The clutter effect of too many uncoordinated volunteers is impeding the effort of getting on with concrete tasks. This was supposed to be on the agenda of the Group of Seven summit in Munich in July, but it was shunted aside because the leaders of the industrial countries couldnt agree on how to organize their assorted aid, credit and technology projects into a coherent program. Everybody wanted to do it their own way.


Later, according to word reaching Paris, the U. S. government asked Paul Volcker, the highly respected former chairman of the Federal Reserve, to pull together at least the American effort in a sustained way. He set some common-sense conditions, a staff permanently established in Moscow to implement plans on a day-to-day basis and the necessary support from Washington. It wasn't forthcoming, so he declined.


That is the way the Marshall Plan worked. There were a lot of different committees, but they operated under an established leadership that set rules and made sure they all fit together.


The usual complaint when Western officials are taken to task for their lack of consistency and failure to move from studies to operations and providing funds is that they dont have consistent and reliable interlocutors.


They say the people on the receiving end keep changing, or changing their minds, or changing the conditions. It is certainly true that Western taxpayers, on the public level, and stockholders, on the private level, are not prepared to pour out money without assurances that it will be usefully put to work.


It seems to me that in the circumstances the donors and investors have to take more responsibility for organizing the absorption capacity. That means more intrusion on sovereignty, more stringent conditionality, clearly explained and explicitly temporary. The initiative has to come from somewhere and confusion must be confronted.


Eduard Shevardnadze, the embattled Georgian leader, warned recently in a Newsweek interview that the social collapse he foresees in Russia could lead to catastrophe and a new severe dictatorship. It has to be taken seriously, as his warning of a putsch in December 1990 should have been taken seriously.


But warnings must lead to action, in East as well as West. There was no post-Cold War planning and nobody has a ready-made blueprint. That doesn't excuse dithering, on either side.


Scarcely a day goes by without new revelations of how badly the communist years ran down the very substance of Eastern economies and societies, enormously more than the worst critics imagined. A new dictatorship might conceal the truth again, but it wouldn't fix anything. The East must do more to help itself be helped, and the West must get on with a coherent response.


Flora Lewis1992