PERSPECTIVE ON CZECHOSLOVAKIA : Hard Path for a Silken Revolution : Civic Forum’s new leader, a hard-line monetarist, promises no soft landing--or even a soft takeoff.

Two days before I arrived here, the first, velvet phase of Czechoslovakia’s revolution came to an end. The immediate cause of this was the surprise election on Oct. 13 of Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus to the chairmanship of Civic Forum, by a stunning margin of more than 2 to 1.

Revolutions have a tendency to produce shakeouts at the top within a year or so, usually in the form of brutal power struggles. But in Czechoslovakia, characteristically, the shakeout is being accomplished on tiptoes, with many of the protagonists unwilling to admit that competing tendencies have emerged within Civic Forum, let alone that one program for Czechoslovakia’s future has won out over another.

Vaclav Klaus is a hard-line monetarist of considerable intellectual gifts, who favors the same kind of headlong rush to the free market as his counterpart, Leszek Balcerowicz, in Poland. Klaus’ language is uncompromising: He promises no soft landing, or even a soft takeoff; price and rent controls will be removed; there will be large-scale unemployment; the International Monetary Fund will be called in, investors invited to take advantage of cheap labor, factories placed on the auction block.

Klaus’ ascent may have taken Civic Forum by surprise, but it has its roots in the silken quality of the Czechoslovak revolution. When the Communist Party collapsed last November, there were signs that Czechoslovakia might be the one Central European country to find that elusive dream of countries in economic transition--the Third Way. A relatively developed infrastructure, a prewar legacy of democratic rule personified by Prime Minister Tomas Masaryk and the gentle charisma of Vaclav Havel all gave grounds for hope.

But Czechoslovakia’s revolution, if such it was, may have happened too fast. In Poland the process took 10 years and was centered on a highly organized labor movement. In Czechoslovakia it took only a few days of crowds braving freezing fog on Wenceslas Square. Czechoslovakia was the last to fall; by the time its turn came, the Wall was down. The Czechoslovak Communists, always the grayest, the stupidest, the most bereft of imagination, were not so much ousted as made to implode.

Against all the lies and hypocrisies of the old regime, Havel and his Civic Forum colleagues stood for the power of the Word, the ability to speak truth, to name what had been unnameable. They espoused what they called anti-politics. “We were concerned with certain values,” Havel said in Prague last week, “and not with power.” In removing the Communist Party, “we did not even need to break a single shop window.”

But at the risk of sounding ungenerous, this may have been the problem. The broken shop windows may be yet to come, and Klaus’ economic plan may soon provoke them. This is a peculiarly Czechoslovakian dilemma. Klaus’ victory is not the outcome of a vulgar putsch, or an act of betrayal. Much less does it suggest that Civic Forum’s leaders are corrupt men, the latest to abide by Montesquieu’s maxim that “every person invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry that power as far as it will go.”

No, the difficulty lies in Civic Forum’s very conception of power. Faced with a totalitarian system in which all institutions were rotten, opposition to Communist power easily slipped into queasiness about political institutions of any sort. To exercise power, or to devise an economic plan, lay outside the competence and interest of Civic Forum’s anti-political intellectuals.

Move outside the charmed circle of the Prague intelligentsia--into the drab factory towns of northern Bohemia, for example--and all the talk is of a year of stagnation and drift, the same idiot nomenklatura still at their posts in the factories and cooperative farms. And Klaus? Yes, people say, we see him on the television. He is young and forceful, he smiles, he has a clear plan. With him we can live like the Germans.

The inexorable laws of power, economics and political conflict fill many members of Civic Forum with genuine alarm. It is common to hear them talk of last November--or even of the communist period--as the happiest time of their lives. For then there was unity against a common enemy. For Havel himself, the rise of Klaus portends grave difficulties. The temptation, as president, will be to place unity above all other considerations. The alternative is to admit that anti-politics and power are, in their essence, incompatible. And if Klaus and Havel should go their separate ways, to which of them will we in the West show our most enduring loyalty?