Tucked away in a lonely corner of Miroslav Grebenicek's Prague office is a portrait of Karl Marx.

Otherwise, the walls in the office of the leader of the Czech and Moravian Communist Party (KSCM) are bare. No portraits of former Czechoslovak President Klement Gottwald, no framed black-and-white pictures of the grand Labor Day parades that once marked each May 1 -- nothing to suggest today's Communist Party is the offspring of the one that ruled Czechoslovakia for more than 40 years.

"We are not oriented to the past; that would be a serious mistake," Grebenicek, 54, said in a recent interview. "Nostalgia cannot be a program for the future."

And despite dismissive pronouncements by dissidents during and immediately after the 1989 revolution, rumors of the communists' death seem greatly exaggerated.

Currently the third-largest party in the 200-member Chamber of Deputies with 24 seats, the KSCM looks hopefully toward next year's national elections. The latest public-opinion polls indicate the party has the support of about 15 percent of Czechs, 10 points behind the center-right Quad Coalition and only five points behind the country's two main political forces, the Social Democrats (CSSD) and the conservative Civic Democrats (ODS). The party won more than 20 percent of the vote in last fall's Senate and regional elections, most of it in rural areas.

And if the KSCM repeats that performance next year, it could become the single largest party in Parliament and a possible government coalition partner.

"We have the right and the chance to become the strongest political party," Grebenicek said. "The KSCM will be respected by its opponents according to how powerful it will be in the polls."

The Communists have achieved their success through a delicate balancing act, refusing to disassociate themselves from their legacy but adapting to the new realities of Czech politics. Ironically, they've managed to cast themselves as rebels outside of a political establishment they accuse of having failed the Czech people since the Velvet Revolution. Gradually, they are positioning themselves as a credible left-wing party that could eventually play a significant role in running the country.

Backed by the Soviet Union, the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948 under Gottwald's leadership. Attempts to liberalize the regime during 1968's Prague Spring were crushed by the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact invasion in August. The country remained under communist rule until 1989, when revolutionary movements swept through the former Eastern bloc.

"It was assumed that the communists would die out, as a sort of biological process, but that has proved false," said political analyst Jiri Pehe, a former adviser to President Vaclav Havel.

In many respects, today's KSCM is far removed from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Two of the main tenets of the former ruling party -- a centrally planned economy and a one-party electoral system -- have been dropped from the new party's platform.

But unlike communist parties in most other former Eastern bloc countries, in Poland and Hungary, for example, the party here has not dropped the word "communist" from its name or disavowed the former regime.

"I am not among those who reject everything from the past. I want to see the past in an objective way," said Grebenicek, who is a former philosophy professor. "I'm not saying there were no problems. ... But looking at it objectively, we can see that a vast majority of the people in this country lived a normal life, enjoyed life; they had their dreams and fulfilled them."


Capitalism critique
Some say the party's refusal to condemn the past accounts for its relative popularity.

"There were about 7 million people in the Communist Party at one point," sociologist Jirina Siklova said. "Many of them are still alive, and to denounce the past would, for them, amount to denouncing the values of their lives. The continuing support for the Communist Party is not a case of nostalgia in the old generation but a quest for satisfaction."

Among the young, Pehe said, support for the Communists stems from the fact that the party has been excluded from power.

Communist legacy 1946: Czechoslovak Communist Party wins 40 percent of the vote in free elections and party leader Klement Gottwald becomes prime minister. 1948: Backed by the Soviets, the communists seize power, nationalizing businesses and ending free elections. 1968: Under the slogan "Socialism with a Human Face," Alexander Dubcek plans to abolish censorship, permit the right of assembly and recognize the right of non-communists to form political organizations. Warsaw Pact armies invade and occupy the country in August, ending liberalization. 1989: Revolutionary movements sweep through the former Eastern bloc, ending communist rule. 1996: In the first parliamentary elections of the country's new Chamber of Deputies, the Communists garner 10 percent of the vote. 1998: In national elections to the Chamber of Deputies, the Communists get 11 percent of the vote.

"Young supporters have no experience with communism; they were 10 or 12 years old when the communist regime collapsed," he said. "They only see the KSCM as the party that hasn't been in any government [since 1989], which deforms their idea of the party."

Grebenicek, of course, sees things differently. He said support for his party is based on a growing gap between rich and poor in the new Czech Republic.

"There is a small group of people here who have become very rich and a much larger group who have a difficult life and are seeing their standards of living declining," he said. "President [Vaclav] Havel once said the way the rich are doing here is the way the poor are doing in the West, which makes me want to ask if the president has ever been in the West."

Grebenicek said that while he supports the idea of a free-market economy, he cannot abide those who refuse to see capitalism's shortcomings.

"Some on the Czech right wing are irritated by the mere question of whether capitalism has any problems," said Grebenicek, whose party supports generous social programs and state ownership in key sectors of the economy, including banking, transportation, telecommunications and energy.

With some notable exceptions, the party's policies and rhetoric are remarkably similar to that of the ruling Social Democrats -- something Grebenicek said is no coincidence.

He accused the CSSD of co-opting the Communists' playbook in the 1998 national election in order to woo voters.

"The CSSD program in 1998 was essentially the program we presented throughout the 1990s. We evaluated both parties' programs and found that about 70 percent of the policies were the same," he said, adding that similarities between the two parties, however, end at their programs.

The CSSD, he said, has been barely more left wing in government than the ODS was. The fact that the Social Democrats, a minority in Parliament, must rely on the ODS to prop them up in government has made them little more than puppets, he said.

"The CSSD says one thing and does another," Grebenicek said. "The first 1,000 days of CSSD rule has been right-wing rule; it is [ODS Chairman] Vaclav Klaus who rules through the CSSD ministers."

He particularly deplores the CSSD's reversal regarding a referendum on membership in NATO, which the country joined in 1999, shortly before it began airstrikes in Serbia aimed at toppling the regime of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

"The CSSD first pushed for a referendum on NATO, then abandoned the idea, and so for the first time in the country's history, we became aggressors."

Despite these differences, Grebenicek said he would welcome the chance to work with the Social Democrats in forming the next government. He admitted that cooperation between the two parties would be "complicated" because some of the CSSD's top members are fervent anti-communists. Asked recently if he would ever form a coalition with the Communists, Vladimir Spidla, the party's new leader, answered with an unqualified no.

Grebenicek is confident Spidla would reconsider that position if it meant keeping the CSSD in power.

"Mr. Spidla has been in office for just a few days now," he said. "I think that life will force him to put aside ideological proclamations and behave in a more pragmatic way."

Others can also see a time, not so far off, when the Communists could play a part in forming the government.

"Sadly, I'm afraid that it could be possible one day," Pehe said. "The KSCM is a part of the parliamentary spectrum and the resistance against it is bound to weaken, especially within the CSSD."


-- Petr Kaspar contributed to this report.


Michael Mainville's e-mail address is mmainville@praguepost.cz