Prague’s Revolutionaries Find a Home : Czechoslovakia: Civic Forum takes over a building that had housed the Soviet friendship society.

Civic Forum activist Jaroslav Koran’s eyes sparkled as he stood in Wenceslas Square and admired “his” building. He described the way he sees it in his imagination.

Near the second-floor windows is a big television screen with a loudspeaker broadcasting history in the making. From a balcony above, Civic Forum leaders are addressing the crowd, and they can be seen half a mile away.

Koran envisions a simple sign on the building: “Just two letters, ‘O’ and ‘F’ “--Civic Forum’s initials in Czechoslovak.

“I wanted this building,” he said. “I decided on it, and I got it. I think it’s the best building we could get.”

Thanks to Koran, the organization that has led the “polite revolution” moved Tuesday from borrowed quarters in the basement of a downtown theater into what had been the offices of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Society.

It was an often-chaotic scene, with students lugging stacks of newspapers and society membership certificates out of the building as volunteers moved partitions and furniture in.

“I feel they need me,” a young woman munching a sandwich said as she tried to direct traffic. “And it’s so exciting!”

Rita Klimova, the former wife of a former Communist Party official who now acts as official English-language interpreter at Civic Forum press conferences, said: “We’re hassling over who gets what room. We made up a beautiful organization chart, but the rooms don’t seem to be built that way.”

Koran said the building on Wenceslas Square--”a kind of showcase for the whole Civic Forum”--is the first of two the city is turning over to the mushrooming democratic movement.

It will get another in January, he said, and this one, in a quiet neighborhood near the British Embassy, “will be the place for the brain trust of Civic Forum, probably a place to deal with some foreign visitors as well.”

The six-story building on Wenceslas Square has about 50 offices, and the other building is about the same size, Koran said. And there may be a third for a press center.

Tuesday’s move was a symbolic watershed, the day this loose collection of armchair revolutionaries took on the trappings of permanence.

“Everybody is working for free so far,” Klimova said. “All we’ve gotten is free sandwiches. Within the next few days we hope to establish a clearer situation: Who gets paid and how much, or if it’s necessary to pay.”

Koran exemplifies the way Civic Forum has been run. He was chosen to negotiate with city officials for property not because of any special expertise--he translates books for a living--but because there was a job that needed doing and he was free at the moment.

One of his previous tasks was negotiating the return to Czechoslovakia of Jaroslav Hutka, the exiled singer and songwriter. Next, Koran said, he may be a delegate to a meeting with the premier of the Czechoslovak republic.

In the course of the 50 hours of negotiations over a building for the movement, Koran needed to retrieve some information from a Civic Forum computer, but he was not familiar with the process. A volunteer came to his aid.

“Are you Koran the translator,” he asked?

“Yes,” Koran replied, “and what’s your profession?”

“I’m a janitor.”

Koran said the negotiations were complicated by Civic Forum’s pressing need to leave the theater, where rehearsals for a new production are about to begin.

Koran skirted questions about how he managed to get the offices of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Society, which is reputed to be the haven of some of this country’s most conservative and dogmatic Communist Party members.