Czech Communists

[Saul Thomas <stthomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Prague Post
Wednesday, March 8, 2000


The red and the righteous Maligned as a retirees' party, Czech Communists
begin uphill battle to woo youth vote

By Dennis Moran


For Czech Communists, Eva Benesova and Michal Hurta are the best of
possible comrades. And they're not even 20.

Long perceived as little more than a repository for roadside discontent,
the resurgent Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) is eagerly
seeking out the one ingredient that might put it on the road to
cosmopolitan legitimacy: the youth vote.

Which makes Benesova and Hurta rare and precious commodities. Despite the
party's significant inroads in national polls, young believers willing to
speak their mind and perhaps cast a Com-munist vote have been scarce.

"This government will probably remain because there is no alternative in
sight, but the future won't be better," Benesova says. "I'm sure I won't
have a job when I finish gymnazium [high school]."

At 18, Prague resident Benesova is hardly a bitter retiree. Nor is Hurta, a
19-year-old from Ostrava. Both are attending a Communist Youth Union
weekend study session where The Communist Manifesto is required reading.
Open to the public, the meetings are held about four times a year by the
union, an adjunct of the KSCM.

Though the Communist Party platform for the 1998 parliamentary elections
included a plank calling for measures against the "Americanization" of
Czech culture, Hurta seems unworried by cultural imperialism.

He wears a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt.

"I don't think there is any threat," says Hurta, dismissing concerns about
the loss of national identity. "The culture here is very strong. And why
should we isolate ourselves?"

Does he not worry about communism's tyrannical past?

"The same thing would not be able to happen twice."

The gray revolution
So far, the KSCM's popularity surge -- fed by disgust and despondency
toward the current government -- has been mostly a gray revolution, its
numbers rising with age.

Though attracting youth to the Party is seen by many as a tall order,
Communist Youth Union organizers predict that their message will catch on.

"I think for young people this is a sort of path as they continue to sober
up from the November [1989] euphoria," says Josef Gottwald, 29, Youth Union
chairman. "Today they are finding out that after university, for example,
they cannot work in their fields. And they can't afford an apartment, and
they can't afford a family, because the economic situation in our country
is in a huge crisis now."

A February poll by the research agency STEM put the KSCM second to the
Civic Democratic Party (ODS), 21.6 percent to 17.9 percent, but among 18-
to 29-year-olds the KSCM managed only 7.9 percent support. At the other
end, 34.2 percent of those 60 and over said they support the KSCM. The
party's overall numbers are down slightly from a late-1999 STEM poll that
gave it 20.4 percent overall.

The Communist Youth Union was born 10 years ago, not long after the
revolution. The weakness of the new system was apparent to some youths even
then, Gottwald says. It was hardly democratic, he argues, when government
dissolved Czechoslovakia, and when the Czech Republic joined NATO without
holding a popular referendum.

Czech voters who turned to the Social Democratic Party (CSSD) in the last
parliamentary elections in June 1998 now find themselves betrayed by that
party's deepening nod to the right-wing Civic Democrats.

But the KSCM must reckon with its own ideological contradictions.

The Party still pledges allegiance to socialism, but officials say it is
also committed to democracy and a combination of private enterprise,
collective cooperatives and state-run firms. At the same time, however, it
has little patience for Czech membership in NATO and looks upon membership
in the European Union with disdain.

Fraud and privatization
Much rides on semantics. While the Communists sound very much like
socialists, they insist they're somehow more reasonable than they were in
their Cold War pariah days.

"It's not true what people say about us -- that if we gain power, we would
take property from people as in 1948," says Vlastimil Balin, KSCM first
deputy chairman. "We openly say we want a change in the system, heading
toward socialism. But not in the total form as we had before 1989."

Privatization has occurred too fast, he says. It hasn't been thought
through or properly regulated, leading to fraud and lost jobs.

As if to build a feasible bridge between past and present, Youth Union
leader Gottwald admits the pre-1989 regime would have benefited from a
small private sector -- "the services were really bad," he says. But now,
he adds, "we're getting into the situation that small and mid-sized
entrepreneurs cannot survive in the current conditions." Small private
farms, he argues, are simply not faring as well as the former collectives.

Gottwald, like many European Communists, tries to spin the collapse of
communism into a cleansing, or would-be rebirth. "It's a paradox," he says,
"but 1989 did bring positive changes to the Communist Party. Those who were
there just for their own benefit left the party, and some of them went
right from the Communist Party to the right-wing parties. Today's KSCM is
supported by people who do care about the social welfare."

Petr Pracny, 32, a laid-off coal miner from Most and a Communist Party
supporter, is a different kind of youth.

"Things might not have been working 100 percent OK before the revolution,
but the army was subsidized, agriculture was subsidized, highways were
being built, housing was being taken care of, health care and everything,"
he says.

Though a nominal Party member before the 1989 revolution, his conviction
didn't deepen until later. "After the revolution, I started inclining
toward the Communist Party because I used to have social benefits such as
the right to work, and other social benefits such as free health care, and
now I don't."

North Bohemia's Most district, home to downsizing giants Chemopetrol
Litvinov and the Mostecka uhelna spolecnost mining company, suffers from
the country's highest unemployment rate -- 20.47 percent in January.

A true believer
"I was the first unemployed person in Most," local Communist Party official
Jiri Kurcin says. An office worker for the district government office, the
50-year-old says he was fired in 1990 for refusing to renounce his
Communist Party membership.

"I was pushed away by Communists who had been in the party longer than I,
and in higher posts. They told me, 'Throw your ID away and we'll find you
something.' And I said, 'I'd rather be a doorman than throw away my ID, my
communist past.' "

Ironically, he's now an entrepreneur, operating a small shop in Most. But
he's still a true believer. Most people were doing well under the old
system, he says: production was better and industry had a plan -- a
five-year plan.

"If you ask the miners [now] how much coal will be mined in five years, no
one knows. At least then people knew what was going to happen in five years."

Disillusion grew, he added, as corruption plagued privatization efforts and
foreign firms were permitted to buy too many strategic companies.

"We have to stand on our own feet," Kurcin concludes. "We are in the
situation where most of the big businesses are in foreign hands. We are
becoming a semi-colony, because the decisions on how the industries are
going to continue working are basically being decided out of the Czech
Republic."


Dennis Moran can be reached at news@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://www.praguepost.cz/news030800a.html