‘Everyone Is a Politician’ in Back Room : NEWS ANALYSIS

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia —  The frazzled nerve center of Czechoslovakia’s new opposition front, the Civic Forum, is located in the basement rehearsal rooms of the Magic Lantern Theater, just off Wenceslas Square.

A sign was taped to the sliding-glass doors of one of those rooms Saturday morning. It said “secret,” and inside, in a haze of smoke that would have made the air of industrial Bratislava look clean, a good part of the opposition’s activist brain trust was in deep discussion.

“Everyone is being a politician today,” said Jan Urban, 44, who was running between the inner circle in the smoke-filled room and the upstairs lobby, where an unremitting stream of students, aides, advisers and couriers arrived with information, instructions, questions and news--all demanding urgent attention. “So, here I am making decisions about things I know nothing about.

“Everyone needs rest,” he went on. “Everyone in that room is a little overwhelmed by success. It is happening so quickly, we are not sure what to do. Yesterday, we had no possibilities; today, there is everything.”

Urban is a leader of Obroda, an organization of about 20,000 former Communist Party members who were chopped from the membership rolls after Alexander Dubcek attempted the “Prague Spring” reforms of 1968, purged by the hard-knuckled party leaders who held power for a 21-year ice age--until, in fact, Friday night. Now, Urban and his colleagues in the Civic Forum believe, the ice age is about over.

It was exactly a week after 10,000 to 15,000 students took to the streets that crowds of Czechoslovaks, swelling daily to more than 500,000--virtually one-third of the capital’s population--toppled the hard-line guardians of Communist control, forcing the resignations of party strongman Milos Jakes and much of the ruling Politburo.

Clearly, as Urban and other Civic Forum activists publicly warned, the Communist Party conservatives were locked in a desperate struggle Saturday to keep their frail boat afloat--and were hoping that a cosmetic change at the top would satisfy the public and opposition demands.

But it was equally apparent that the swift-moving events here have set off a major upheaval in a party that can no longer consider turning back to the neo-Stalinist policies of the Jakes regime.

“There have been informal contacts, already this morning, between Ademec’s people and us,” said Urban, referring to Ladislav Adamec, who resigned from the Politburo and remains as a caretaker prime minister but who may be preparing to lead a fight for control of a deeply divided Czechoslovak Communist Party.

In the current climate of Eastern Europe, where Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has put his weight behind reformers in any intra-party fight, the odds are sharply in favor of the reformers here, although the struggle may take days--or longer--to play out.

The examples of Hungary and Poland suggest that the future is almost certain to include negotiations between the Communist authorities and the opposition, represented here by the Civic Forum.

As in Poland, where months elapsed between the first suggestion and the actual beginning of serious negotiations, the process in Czechoslovakia could take months--and many difficult turns. But substantive talks seem virtually guaranteed by the obvious weakness of the party and a public too aroused to allow a return to the mood of silent, sullen acquiescence that characterized much of the population in recent years.

That grim mood of the past has gone, and Czechoslovaks in recent days have been talking--with a kind of amazement--about the changed atmosphere; people, they say, are being nice to each other.

The Czechoslovaks are congratulating themselves that they have accomplished, in just eight days, a feat that many people, in the darkest times of the last three or four years, thought they might never manage--to rise up in the streets and demand the removal of the Communists from power.

The changes now under way here have come at the end of a long year of upheaval in Eastern Europe, which, step by step, have left the Czechoslovak Communists isolated and weakened--and newly vulnerable to any pressure from the streets.

Jakes, in his resignation speech to the party’s Central Committee here Friday night, admitted that he and the party leadership had failed to recognize the “impact on our society” of the changes in neighboring countries, citing particularly East Germany.

But often overlooked in recent weeks, amid the changes in the party leaderships of East Germany and Bulgaria, is the significant role played in the affairs of Eastern Europe this year by Hungary--the only nation in the Warsaw Pact to be approaching free elections without the pressure of street demonstrations.

The Hungarians, in May, triggered a series of events by deciding to tear down their border fences with neighboring Austria. That decision led directly to the discovery by thousands of vacationing East Germans that the West, shut off by the Berlin Wall and a border lined by barbed wire and 47,000 armed guards, could be reached through Hungary.

The exodus shifted from Hungary to Prague as thousands of East Germans sought refuge--and passage to the West--at the West German Embassy here. That mounting pressure, which further fueled East German street protests in Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin, eventually toppled the regime of Erich Honecker, 77, who--along with like-minded party leaders in Czechoslovakia--had successfully withstood mounting pressure from Moscow to institute reforms.

Gorbachev had seemed willing to tolerate Honecker’s resistance, but only until that resistance began to result in an embarrassing international spectacle. It was not long after the Soviet leader’s visit to East Berlin--in connection with East Germany’s 40th anniversary observances--that Honecker and most of his Politburo were replaced.

And then, just as Honecker’s replacement, Egon Krenz, was presiding over the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria was toppled in a rebellion by party moderates and reformers, obviously acting with Gorbachev’s backing.

The demise of these two longtime Communist leaders set up the situation in Czechoslovakia, signaling to the opposition and to thoughtful members of the public that the Communists in control here were suddenly vulnerable in two ways: an outpouring of public dissent, or a division inside the party that pitted its cautious reformers against the conservatives.

There were some opposition activists, journalists and diplomats who thought the prospects for change were slim, even on the eve of the demonstrations that began Nov. 17. They saw few signs that the Czechoslovak opposition could draw more than 10,000 to participate in a street demonstration, based on evidence as recent as October, when police routed demonstrators with fire hoses and clubs. On the other hand, they said, the few liberals in the party were still too timid to lead an intra-party fight that they would surely lose.

Contrary to those experts, the Czechoslovak public, for all its quietness, was reading the signs and had a sense that the time was right. After the police waded into the demonstrators Nov. 17, bashing heads and sending dozens to hospitals, the final signal had been sent--and understood--and the Czechoslovaks came out, not in the thousands but in the hundreds of thousands.

In doing so, they set off the battle inside the party, a struggle that is virtually certain--when the dust finally settles--to have routed the hard-liners who have held undisputed power here for two decades.

Czechoslovakia’s gentle campaign in the streets is not yet over, but, as the joyous mood in the streets of Prague suggests, it has already been won.