Year Later, Velvet Has Worn Off Czech Shake-Up : Anniversary: President Bush will help commemorate the revolution. But uncertainty has replaced euphoria.

One year after the magical week in which it enthralled the world, Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” has lost a lot of its warm, plushy feel.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it,” asked Martin Bartunek, a 20-year-old editor of a newspaper called the Student Paper, “that to get on Wenceslas Square to see President Bush and Havel, we all have to have tickets?”

President Bush will be joining President Vaclav Havel today behind a shield of bulletproof glass on the historic central square to help celebrate the day one year ago when a crowd of students, in a bloody confrontation with Czechoslovak police, touched off 10 days of massive demonstrations that brought down the Communist government.

Then, of course, no tickets were needed. In what was easily the most photogenic of Eastern Europe’s political upheavals in a tumultuous political year, crowds approaching half a million daily surged onto the square--adoring each other and their dissident and often-jailed hero, the gravelly-voiced Havel, as well as the once-disgraced former Communist reformer Alexander Dubcek, who addressed them from balcony windows.

By now, not surprisingly, the euphoria has vanished. And the uncertainty, largely economic, has begun.

The steady pressure of Slovak nationalists for greater autonomy--if not outright independence from the Czech republic--has become a relentless irritant and, some say, a time-consuming distraction from what should be the more pressing business of getting the country moving economically.

Civic Forum, the umbrella organization formed by Havel and others a year ago to provide a front against the Communists, has undergone divisive internal fights, pitting Havel’s liberal camp against free-market reformers led by Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus. Klaus, so far, appears to have won--and insiders predict that a more distinct rupture is likely.

“The situation is bad,” said Alena Drapkova, 54, who works in a magazine and newspaper shop off Wenceslas Square, and whose comments echo the common complaints of the street. “Goods are disappearing from the stores, and when they are there, they are too expensive. I cease to understand politics. When I read the newspapers, I just get more confused.”

“This is not a happy time,” another Prague businesswoman says. “Everyone is nervous. Everyone is uncertain. There is a strong feeling that the Communists are still around, still in positions of power. People don’t know if they’ll still have their jobs in six months.”

And there is, also naturally, a distinct cooling in the public’s romance with Civic Forum.

“Civic Forum is taking a lot of criticism now,” said Vladimir Zelezny, the forum’s official spokesman. “There are no visible signs of benefit yet in the economy, only the problems of transition. People are not prepared for the short, sharp shock which will come in January (when the first of Klaus’ economic reforms are applied).”

Havel, the philosopher-playwright-president, is still popular. But it is striking that in a time in which practical economic matters are foremost concerns to many here, it is Vaclav Klaus’ name, not Havel’s, that is spoken most often, generally in admiring tones.

“I like Vaclav Klaus as finance minister,” said Ales Drapal, 35, a Charles University mathematician. “These people from the Charter ’77 movement don’t like him so much. He did not sign the charter. He refused to sign a statement on behalf of Havel (when Havel was jailed in early 1989).

“But Klaus worked honestly in his field, which was economics. And he can make contact with normal people, who were afraid back then to get involved in politics. The problem with the charter people is they cannot find a common language because they see themselves in such strict moral terms,” Drapal said. “There are some who have this moral righteousness and try to erase it. There are some who recognize it in themselves and cannot erase it. And there are some who try to advance themselves on it.”

The Charter ’77 human rights declaration, signed by Havel and other Czechoslovak dissidents, formed the center of Communist opposition in Czechoslovakia. For years, the charter activists were the sole and often isolated voice of protest in a country where the hard-line authorities in effect bought public acquiescence with a high standard of living.

Czechoslovaks had more cars, more houses in the country, than their East Bloc neighbors, provided they kept their mouths shut and stayed out of politics. Meanwhile, the Charter ’77 dissidents were shunted in and out of jail and given jobs as coal stokers and janitors. Whether it is intended or in fact imagined, the resulting high moral tone from some charterists is resented in some quarters and, some observers say, has quietly fueled some disputes within Civic Forum.

Havel had nominated a longtime charter activist, Martin Palous, a deputy foreign minister, to head the organization. But it was Klaus, who had refused to sign the charter or even to sign a petition supporting Havel, who won the election.

The evident split was one that has become apparent in the post-Communist politics of Poland as well--the liberals versus the hard-knuckled free-market conservatives. And the Czechoslovaks are about at the point today where the Poles were eight months ago, when the verbal clashes were at their most intense between the conservative Lech Walesa camp and the liberals aligned with Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

The Polish split in Solidarity has resulted in the current presidential campaign in that country, with Walesa the odds-on favorite to win in the Nov. 25 election. Similarly, some Civic Forum activists see a formal divide coming in their own organization.

“We want normal politics here,” said one Civic Forum official, who asked not to be identified. “That means there has to be a left alternative to Klaus. Without a left-wing opposition, it is impossible. I think a split is virtually inevitable.”

Such divisions, most political analysts agree, indeed represent the “normalization” of Eastern European politics and should be regarded as a positive development, not as the sad shattering of old alliances. After all, they say, the old alliances were formed against an enemy, the Communists, who have ceased to exist as a significant political force.

The new political battles--the fresh wounds in the new system, even the disenchantments--are simply part of the process.

The soft plush may be worn off the velvet in Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but there is no sense that anyone wants to return to what was there before.