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Towards Breakthrough or Breakdown? The
Consolidation of KSCM as a Neo-Communist
Successor Party in the Czech Republic
S. Hanley
To cite this article: S. Hanley (2001) Towards Breakthrough or Breakdown? The Consolidation of
KSCM as a Neo-Communist Successor Party in the Czech Republic, The Journal of Communist
Studies and Transition Politics, 17:3, 96-116, DOI: 10.1080/714003581
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/714003581
Published online: 08 Sep 2010.
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Towards Breakthrough or Breakdown?
The Consolidation of KSČM as a
Neo-Communist Successor Party in
the Czech Republic
SEÁN HANLEY
The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia is unusual among communist
successor parties in having maintained a clear communist identity after 1989. This can
be explained by reference to the concept of ‘subcultural party’, catering for a particular
segment of the population. This particular identity emerged as a result of a protracted
internal struggle, in addition to the obvious need to address the electorate and win
votes. Moreover, close examination of the party’s programmes and its leaders’
utterances indicates that it is more than simply a traditional communist party inspired
by revenge for the collapse of the old system or by nostalgia for the past, but in fact
contains innovative and democratic elements that have been hitherto overlooked by
observers. It is well placed to take advantage of the new political circumstances, a
feature that challenges its new identity as a subcultural party.
The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) in the Czech
Republic is an isolated exception among successor parties in East and
Central Europe in having maintained and renewed a communist identity
after 1989. The KSČM’s ‘orthodox’ character compared with other former
ruling parties in the region, coupled with lack of empirical data on the party,
have frequently led it to be viewed by analysts as a holdover, whose politics
are essentially unchanged from those of its pre-1989 predecessor, the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). Standard works on the region
characteristically describe it as an ‘unreformed conservative-communist
party’,1
a ‘real “dinosaur” of Leninism which has no future ... relegated to
the left ghetto of the new party system ...’.2
More specialized comparative
discussions of successor parties have largely confined themselves to noting
KSČM’s exceptionalism and the opportunity which this provided to the
‘historic’ Czech Social Democrats (ČSSD) to emerge as the principal party
of the Czech left.3
Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic itself political
scientists have tended to treat the party purely as an example of an ‘antisystem’
or ‘extremist’ party.4
Seán Hanley is Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Government at Brunel University, UK.
Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.17, No.3, September 2001, pp.96–116
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
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However, in 1998–89, against a background of economic stagnation and
growing public disenchantment with ineffective minority governments, the
KSČM confounded much conventional wisdom by undergoing a rapid
increase in popularity, suggesting not only that its political death was much
exaggerated, but that its ‘neo-communist’ strategy was paying unexpected
political dividends. This article examines the reasons for KSČM’s
endurance after 1990 and its re-emergence as a significant actor in Czech
politics in the late 1990s. After reviewing the existing literature on Czech
communism and KSČM, I will suggest that throughout most of the first
decade after 1989 KSČM can be understood as a ‘subcultural party’, whose
emergence was the product of a protracted internal struggle, rather than the
simple projection of historical factors into the post-communist era. This
struggle opposed a ‘neo-communist’ strategy driven by a ‘logic of
constituency representation’ to a ‘social democratic’ one of office-seeking
and vote maximization.5
I will note that the ‘neo-communist’ strategy and
ideology adopted by KSČM in 1993 is more complex than the simple
revanchism, conservatism or ‘Leninism’ often ascribed to the party and
contains significant innovative and democratic elements. I will conclude by
analysing the growth in KSČM support in the late 1990s and the dilemmas
it may pose for the party. I will suggest that the possibility of significant
electoral success without any corresponding increase in the party’s coalition
potential may be more destabilizing than beneficial to the party.
Understanding Czech Communism, Understanding the KSČM
Political Legacies and the Czech Communist Tradition
Country-specific monographs, as well as more recent comparative work on
party systems,6
highlight a number of powerful structural factors militating
towards the emergence of a highly conservative, anti-reformist communism
in the Czech Lands after 1989. The two factors most usually picked out are:
(1) the significant, although varying, levels of mass support for communism
in the Czech Lands historically; and (2) the critical weakness of reformists
within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the
‘Prague Spring’ in 1968–69. First, unusually for East and Central Europe,
the Czech Lands developed a mass social-democratic labour movement in
the late nineteenth century which produced a large Communist Party. The
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) existed throughout the
democratic inter-war Czechoslovak Republic with an electoral base of
10–15 per cent. After the war, boosted by the collapse of the pre-war
democratic regime at Munich in 1938, the KSČ emerged as a mass force,
taking 38 per cent of the Czechoslovak vote and 40 per cent of the Czech
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vote in the 1946 elections. In February 1948 the Communists were thus able
to take power in a coup which outwardly respected legal forms and enjoyed
a degree of popular backing unique in Eastern Europe. Mass support and the
modern administrative and social structures then combined to create a
‘bureaucratic authoritatian’ regime significantly more repressive and
reform-averse than weaker national-communist regimes in Hungary and
Poland.7
The successor party derived from this regime was thus disinclined
to undergo post-communist social democratization after 1989 following the
Polish or Hungarian models.
However, even in purely historical terms, such structural explanations
tend to overlook the dualistic character of Czechoslovak and Czech
communism, which oscillated between being a broad-based nationaldemocratic
movement and an isolated, pro-Soviet subculture.8
Indeed, some
analysts have suggested that it was precisely the strength of ‘socialdemocratic’
tendencies in the Czechoslovak party that explains the strength,
and ultimately the success, of Soviet-backed attempts to transform it into a
reform-averse party loyal to Moscow. Rupnik, for example, notes that the
relatively open ‘Austro-Marxist’ character of the KSČ in the 1920s
necessitated a thoroughgoing process of ‘Bolshevization’ directed from
Moscow in 1929.9
Similarly, having become a vehicle for one of the most
radical reform communist projects seen in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, the
KSČ was transformed by the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968 and the
post-invasion ‘normalization’ regime, which systematically expelled
reformers from the party and debarred them from positions of influence.
This, rather than a ‘bureaucratic authoritarian’ legacy per se, established the
inflexible, hardline and conservative course consistently maintained until
the regime’s demise in November 1989, suggesting that the KSČM’s post-
1989 course was based on a more limited legacy substantially deriving from
the ‘normalization’ period.
The Role of Political Contingency
However, while offering insight into the character of the KSČ as a ruling
party, all such historically based accounts of the development of the Czech
successor party largely ignore actual political processes after 1989. Another
set of explanations for the ‘non-social-democratization’ of KSČM,
however, stresses the role of politically contingent events within the party in
the early 1990s. For, as Grzymala-Busse notes,10
the broadly similar strength
of the communist tradition and legacies in Slovakia saw the former ruling
party there take a very different post-communist social-democratic course
after 1989. It is generally agreed that, although reformist pockets did exist
within the KSČ,11
the party was wholly unprepared for political transition in
November 1989 and the onset of competitive pluralistic politics thereafter.
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Having decided against a Chinese-style ‘solution’ of mass repression
against the popular protests of the Velvet Revolution,12
the party leadership
was politically paralysed and responsibility for transition negotiations
passed by default to Ladislav Adamec, the federal prime minister. By the
time the party convened an extraordinary congress on 20–21 December
1989, the key mechanisms of the country’s transition had thus already been
agreed with the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence movements.13
Although radical in terms of personnel changes and reformist in tone,
the extraordinary congress was a desperate and largely incoherent attempt
to come to terms with the party’s sudden loss of power and to formulate a
response to it. It swept away the entire pre-November leadership of the
party, re-electing only four members of the 200-strong Central Committee.14
Resolutions passed included a rejection of the doctrines of the
‘normalization’ period, an apology for the wrongdoings committed by the
Communist Party since 1948, an acceptance of the loss of its ‘leading role’
in society and general endorsements of the rule of law, a ‘socialist market’,
human rights and democracy. However, despite a commitment to become a
‘modern political party’ and the use of previously taboo phrases borrowed
from both the dissident opposition (‘democracy for all’) and 1960s reform
communism (‘Action Programme’, ‘renewal’), such resolutions set out no
clear political direction. However, the congress belatedly enacted a key
reformist demand of the Prague Spring by deciding to federalize the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia into two autonomous national parties.
While the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS) had formally existed since
1930, in the Czech Lands a ‘new’ party had to be created, the Communist
Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), formally established on 31 March
1990.15
Other than this, the most concrete changes made were measures to
democratize and decentralize party organization, including formal
recognition of the role of ‘platforms’ (factions).
Grzymala-Busse argues that reformers within KSČM were marginalized
at an early stage by the encouragement of the highly visible, but politically
ineffective, ‘platforms’ among those few Czech Communists with ideas
about how to meet the challenge of democratic politics at that time. They
were thus, she argues, prevented from launching an early pre-emptive strike
to transform the party into a post-communist social-democratic formation as
occurred in neighbouring Slovakia with the Communist Party of Slovakia
(KSS) (later the Party of the Democratic Left (SDĽ). Rather than tradition
and historical legacies, the key variable, she argues, was the strategy of a
small number of elite actors and their failure to capitalize on the unique
political opportunities offered by the post-transition period.
Such an approach rightly reinstates the importance of political
contingency and internal party dynamics into the former ruling party’s
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adaptation to democratic politics. However, it focuses on the period before
1993 – and principally on events in 1990–91 – and addresses itself more to
the failure of reformers in the KSČM than the success of the ‘neocommunists’
who took control of the party in 1993 and their subsequent
strategy. Crucially, it does not address the issue of how and why the ‘neocommunist’
orientation proved a more politically viable strategy,
sustainable in the relatively long term both electorally and within the party
itself. We therefore need to refocus our analysis of political agency within
KSČM on the nature of neo-communists’ successful political choices and
strategies in the period 1990–93. Such an analysis not only implies that the
historically derived constraints of the Czech communist tradition were
perhaps greater than Grzymala-Brusse suggests, but also offers some insight
as to why KSČM was subsequently able to stabilize itself as a ‘neocommunist’
party.
Internal Conflicts and Competing Electoral Rationalities 1990–93
The KSČM’s isolation in the 1990s as an ‘orthodox’ party must to a large
extent be seen as the result of a conscious collective choice to adopt a ‘neocommunist’
strategy, rather than a simple reflection of historical legacies, or
a one-off instance of elite miscalculation in the immediate post-transition
period. It was the outcome of a complex and prolonged internal political
struggle in the years 1990–93, which engaged both party elites and
substantial sections of the party’s grassroots membership and saw the
formulation of sophisticated rival projects for the former ruling KSČM’s
adaption to post-communist democratic politics.
The Failure of Reform
According to observers, three broad currents were discernible in KSČM as
early as January 1990: ‘democratic socialist’, ‘reformist’ anti-Stalinist, and
‘neo-Stalinist’.16
From late 1990, such alternatives increasingly found their
way into the mainstream internal politics of the party. At the first KSČM
congress in Olomouc in November 1990 Jiří Svoboda, a film director and
non-conformist intellectual, was elected party chairman, defeating the more
conservative Jan Machalík by 387 votes to 248.17
A reformer esentially in
agreement with the ‘democratic-socialist’ current, Svoboda sought to
transform the KSČM into the basis of a solid, well-organized Left
acceptable to a broad section of Czech society, by salvaging the democratic
and progressive aspects of the communist tradition and dropping the word
‘communist’ in favour of the label ‘Democratic Socialist’ or ‘Radical Left’.
Svoboda and his allies initially adopted a relatively evolutionary approach,
intending to change the party’s name at the Olomouc congress to a
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transitional ‘Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia: Party of
Democratic Socialism’.18
However, while delegates approved a ‘democratic
socialist’ programme they rejected the name change.
By 1991–92, factional conflicts were openly emerging inside the party.
The creation of a social-democratically-oriented Democratic Left faction by
younger Communist deputies was paralleled by the growing militancy of
conservative communists, including the neo-Stalinist ‘Marxist-Leninist
Clubs’.19
In 1991 the Democratic Left successfully called for a referendum
of members on changing the party name. However, in the referendum, held
in 1992, 75.94 per cent of those voting opted to retain the existing name.20
The second KSČM congress, held at Kladno in December 1992, showed the
growing strength of conservatives in the party, reinterpreting the 1990
Olomouc programme as a starting-point for the KSČM, rather than a
definitive statement of a post-communist orientation.21
However, Svoboda –
who was in hospital and unable to attend the congress after a near-fatal
assault by a presumed anti-communist extremist – was overwhelmingly reelected
party chairman in a highly charged atmosphere. In January 1993, a
number of prominent figures in the pre-November 1989 regime, such as the
former Prague party leader Miroslav Štěpán and the former interior minister
Jaromír Obzina, who had been readmitted to the party, triggered an internal
party crisis by forming the ‘For Socialism’ platform, which called
unashamedly for the restoration of the old regime.22
Such open communist
revanchism led Svoboda to intensify his campaign to reform the party. He
demanded the expulsion of the ‘For Socialism’ leaders, an immediate
change in the party’s name and the adoption of an unambiguously postcommunist
orientation. When on 10 March 1993 the KSČM Central
Committee excised Svoboda’s key concept of ‘democratic socialism’ from
its declaration, he announced that he was resigning as party chairman.23
However, he withdrew his resignation after the Central Committee passed a
motion stating that it did not consider the ‘For Socialism’ leaders to be
members of the party and called the party’s third congress early in June
1993 to resolve the issues of party name and identity. In the succeeding
weeks it quickly became apparent at pre-congress district conferences that
Svoboda’s strategy would be heavily defeated, as two-thirds of KSČM
district organizations supported retention of the party’s existing name.24
Facing defeat, Svoboda declared that would neither seek re-election as
chairman, nor remain a member of an unreformed KSČM.25
The Neo-Communist Alternative
Svoboda viewed the choice facing the KSČM as one between neo-Stalinist
obscurantism and post-communist ‘democratic socialism’.26
However, from
1992 onwards a third, ‘neo-communist’ faction, derived from the ‘reformist
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anti-Stalinist’ current observed in 1990, emerged in the party, seeking a
middle way which would retain the communist character of the party while
jettisoning crude anti-democratic neo-Stalinism. The third KSČM congress,
which was held in the town of Prostějov, produced a clear victory for the
neo-communist faction and its conception of the party.27
It rejected the idea
of a name change and elected as party chairman the leading neo-communist
candidate Miroslav Grebeníček, a former university lecturer in history who
had been one of the party deputy chairmen. However, it also voted to expel
the leaders of the ‘For Socialism’ platform – whose politics Grebeníček and
other neo-communists had always firmly rejected – and abolished any
formal role for platforms in the party on the grounds that they gave too
much influence to minorities.28
Although space precludes detailed analysis of rival internal strategies,29
there were a number of tactical and organizational factors underlying
Svoboda’s failure and the neo-communists’ victory. First, the extensive
post-November 1989 democratization and decentralization of party
structures gave district organizations substantial autonomy, making radical
reorganization driven by the centre unfeasible. Second, Svoboda seems to
have underestimated the importance of ideology and identity to KSČM
members, as is suggested by his assertions that rank-and-file communists
were ‘decent people’ who had joined the party from essentially publicspirited
motivations.30
Finally, Svoboda’s tactics of seeking a rapid
resolution of key issues by focusing on the symbolic question of the party
name further weakened his position and mobilized opposition against him.
However, it is puzzling that such a degree of division should have convulsed
the party, given the apparent broad policy consensus on other issues. Postcommunist
‘democratic socialists’ and neo-communists agreed on many
important issues: the idea of democratization after 1989 as a free-market
‘property putsch’ (majetkový puč); the key aspects of the party’s social and
economic policy (egalitarian, statist interventionist, nationalistic); the
nature of the party’s social constituency (losers in transformation); and the
need to reject neo-Stalinism.
However, the conflict over the apparently symbolic issue of the party’s
name concealed different assessments of the party’s past and different
strategies for its future resting on contradictory rationalities of electoral
competition. For post-communist reformers, with the exception of the 1968
Prague Spring, communist rule was largely a period of crimes and
‘inexcusable violations of human rights’,31
which had collapsed in
November 1989 because it was rightly rejected by the people.32
‘Real
socialism’, reformers argued, would always be an unattractive political
model, indelibly associated with the communist party.33
The name
‘communist’ was therefore ‘a kind of burden, which drives both our
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deputies and our party as a whole into a corner’,34
making it naive to
imagine that in any social crisis voters would automatically turn
nostalgically to the communists.35
Moreover, having, as they saw it, adopted
a non-communist ‘democratic socialist’ programme (at Olomouc), the
KSČM had already ceased to be a communist party and, logically, should
signal this to the Czech public by changing its name.36
Moreover, at the
tactical level, Svoboda and his supporters noted, the splitting of
Czechoslovakia at the end of 1992 had removed the potential for a left-wing
federal coalition with Slovak parties, leaving the KSČM and the Czech Left
in a new, more right-wing-dominated Czech party system.37
Conversely, however, if the policies of the Czech Right faltered,
opportunities for the Left would open up. While KSČM on its own was too
weak to constitute a viable Left,38
it would be, they argued, well placed to
act as the core of a left-wing alliance, if it could make itself acceptable to
potential coalition partners and win over emerging social groups. In January
1992 the KSČM formed the Left Bloc (LB),39
an electoral coalition linking
it in the Czech Lands with a number of tiny left-wing groups, which in the
June 1992 elections polled 14 per cent of the Czech vote and emerged as the
largest Czech opposition party. The creation of the Left Bloc was intended
as a step towards the creation of such a post-communist electoral alliance,
organized along the lines of the Polish Democratic Left Alliance.40
However, to make such an alliance viable, Svoboda argued, the KSČM not
only had to change its identity but also ‘gradually to seek the outline of a
common minimum programme’ capable of ‘uniting the opposition (from
centre to radical left)’.41
However, if the KSČM were to miss the ‘historic
opportunity that social development will undoubtedly offer’ then other leftwing
forces would ultimately take that role, leaving the communists an
isolated, declining political sect with an elderly membership and declining
organization.42
In purely ideological terms, neo-communists viewed Svoboda’s concept
of ‘democratic socialism’ as unacceptable because it was a socialdemocratic
programme of ameliorating capitalism, rather than a communist
programme of seeking a systemic alternative. This, they argued, was not
only a denial of the party’s identity and raison d’être but not a real
alternative given the apparent exhaustion of West European social
democracy. However, neo-communists such as Miroslav Ransdorf, the
faction’s leading ideologue, offered ideas of an ‘expansive transformation’
of the KSČM as an alternative to Svoboda’s project which rested on a quite
different rationale, countering all the key arguments advanced in the
reformist project. ‘Neo-communists’ viewed the issue of the party’s name
as a distracting and irrelevant one, imposed on the party from outside.43
A
new name, they argued, would be cosmetic and unnecessary, as any
103KSČM AS A NEO-COMMUNIST SUCCESSOR PARTY: CZECH REPUBLIC
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successor party would always be associated by the Czech public with its
communist predecessor.44
Moreover, for neo-communists, maintaining a
communist identity was ‘a symbol that we have not gone down on our
knees’.45
Neo-communists also saw Svoboda’s project as undemocratic and
dangerous because it was attempting to impose a predetermined set of
changes from above, rather than seeking an orientation that could attain
majority support within the party through its newly democratized internal
mechanisms. He was thus, in their view, risking a potentially disastrous
split.
Neo-communists were sceptical about the strategic assumption that it
would be possible to create a single broad left-wing bloc: the communist
and social-democrat programmes were, they claimed, incompatible, and
moreover in the Czech Republic the centre-left was already occupied by the
Social Democratic Party (ČSSD). Neo-communists countered the examples
of the success of post-communist parties in Poland and Lithuania cited by
reformers, by noting the models of orthodox parties in Western Europe,
such as the French Communist Party and the Italian ‘Communist
Refoundation’.46
Rather than risk alienating the party’s loyal electorate, neocommunist
thinkers such as Ransdorf concluded that ‘[i]t would be rational
to appeal to those citizens Social Democracy cannot catch’.47
Nevertheless,
Ransdorf and other neo-communists consciously accepted the neocommunist
strategy’s costs. While considering that communist isolation
was exaggerated and partly surmountable through local activism, they
accepted that in the forseeable future the party would be isolated and
confined to a purely defensive and oppositional stance. Ransdorf, for
example, wrote of holding a ‘line of defence for the movement and the
rights of working people’.48
Communists, he argued, should think in the
long term and ‘not fear years in the wilderness and have the courage to
swim against the tide (jít proti proudu)’.49
Overall, therefore, neocommunists’
analysis of both the internal dynamics of their own party and
the wider context of Czech politics, led them to see their strategy as more
principled but also more realistic than a project of post-communist social
democratization.50
Such competing perceptions and strategies can be viewed in more than
purely local and descriptive terms. Kitschelt, for example, has distinguished
two fundamental logics that parties in competitive multi-party systems
may follow: ‘a logic of constituency representation’ where a party’s
‘organization, strategy and progress are derived from the ideology of their
core support groups in society’ and a ‘logic of electoral competition’ in
which parties ‘adapt political stances to appeal to their marginal
sympathizers in order to maximize electoral support’.51
By giving priority to
the demands of the KSČM’s loyal mass membership and existing voters, the
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neo-communist orientation can be seen to follow a ‘logic of constituency
representation’, which gave the party’s chances of gaining political
influence a lower priority than its role of representing its established
supporters. Svoboda’s strategy of transforming the KSČM into an
electorally attractive, coalition-building Party of Democratic Socialism or a
broad Left Bloc, by contrast, reflected ‘a logic of electoral competition’.
In this context it is tempting to see Svoboda’s strategy as a ‘rational’
course and the ‘neo-communist’ outcome as an irrational or ‘sub-optimal’
deviation from it introduced by the distorting effect of ideology and
tradition. In theoretical terms, rational choice and party competition
literature has long noted that the institutional dynamics between internal
party actors can lead parties as to adopt electoral strategies that are
‘irrational’ in terms of party competition.52
However, as Kitschelt observed
more recently, there are typically a number of potentially rational strategies
open to parties in a competitive party system, all of which will
characteristically involve trade-offs.53
It may therefore not be
straightforwardly possible to determine which set of strategic assumptions
was more realistic or more ‘rational’, given the need to maintain the party
not only as an electorally successful force, but also as an internally stable
organization.
A ‘Subcultural Party’?
As with other Eastern and Central European party phenomena, in the case
of the KSČM the conceptual tools of Western-based party literatures do not
seem fully adequate. A ‘logic of constituency representation’ is usually
characteristic of newly formed parties with highly mobilized, ideologically
motivated support interested in wide-ranging policy change and the intrinsic
rewards of participation, an example being the Green parties which emerged
in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. It is true that since 1993 the
KSČM has made sustained efforts to reformulate its ideology in democratic,
but nevertheless communist, terms. Qualitative analysis of KSČM
programmatic documents thus reveals a relatively coherent, if eclectic,
ideology centering on resistance to capitalist restoration and foreign
influence; an étatistic vision of a market economy with a dominant public
sector; rejection of Czech membership of NATO and a highly sceptical view
of accession to the EU; and a limited and ambiguous critique of the period
of communist one-party rule.54
Despite its lack of political influence, the KSČM has also consistently
devoted considerable efforts to researching and drafting detailed policy and
legislative proposals. However, the KSČM cannot really be considered a
newly formed party and its rank-and-file members do not seem to have been
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strongly mobilized or policy-seeking. Internal KSČM documents repeatedly
bemoan the failure of members to take an active interest in party activities,
‘self-government’ and policy discussion.55
Rather than substantive policies,
KSČM membership and core support seem motivated more by a sense of
tradition and identity – what Panebianco terms ‘identity incentives’ – most
usually found in the memberships of long-established historical parties in
established democracies.56
However, the notion of the ‘subcultural party’, developed by Enyedi
using a case study of the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) in
Hungary, may offer a means of resolving such paradoxes. The ‘subcultural
party’, Enyedi argues, is defined as a type of party rarely, but not wholly
exceptionally, found in Eastern and Central Europe, based on a distinct,
culturally defined segment of society with similar lifestyles, ‘common
norms, values and convictions’, ‘feelings of solidarity and loyalty to each
other’ which is organizationally expressed by the party and affiliated
organizations.57
While echoing the ‘encapsulation’ strategies of historical
mass parties, such a ‘subcultural strategy’ need not imply mass
organization, but merely the creation of networks of ‘social organizations
that claim to represent the values and interests of a culturally and
ideologically well-defined group’.58
Such an approach thus represents a lowyield
but relatively low-risk strategy in a context of rapid change, provided
that the party subculture can be protected from external erosion.
The KSČM’s social constituencies and organizational structure in the
1990s reveal precisely such a picture of a ‘subcultural party’ with a ‘mass’
organization that has depth rather than breadth. First, to a significantly
greater extent than other successor parties in Eastern and Central Europe the
KSČM has retained a mass membership and organization. The party is
numerically by far the largest political organization in the Czech Republic,
with its membership of 136,000 more than double that of its nearest rival,
the Christian Democratic Union (KDU–ČSL).
Estimates and internal data suggest that after post-transition losses and
further sharp decline in the period 1991–93, membership stabilized at a
slowly declining level of 100,000–200,000 (see Table 1),59
although the
party’s branch network is declining more rapidly than these figures suggest,
as networks of branch chairmen and councillors and district party
organizations are increasingly replacing local branches as the effective
organizers of local activity.60
Despite having succeeded in re-creating a central apparatus and a nationwide
organizational network based on a territorial rather than a work-place
basis, the KSČM membership has rapidly become one largely composed of
retired people, with internal party sources suggesting that among those
members who remained in the party after 1989, the largest cohort joined in
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the immediate post-war period. For example, a report to the 1992 KSČM
congress, based on an extensive membership survey, showed that 37.4 per
cent of members had joined the party during 1945–48, compared with only
18.2 per cent who joined during the height of the ‘normalization’ period
(1971–80).61
Moreover, since 1990 the KSČM has attracted few new
members – figures from 1992 suggested, for example, that only 0.5 per cent
of party members had joined after that date62
– and the party had particularly
weak appeal for young people: the KSČM youth organization, the
Communist Union of Youth (KSM) was estimated to have had only 250
members in 1998.63
Internal structural relationships within the party also
reflected a ‘mass’ conception of party organization. Despite limited
investment in information technology, elite–mass links were mainly
organized through a hierarchical organizational pyramid and face-to-face
contacts at local level, as well as through the party’s daily and weekly
newspapers Haló noviny (circulation 30,000–40,000) and Naše pravda,
which served both as an internal channel of communication to the rank-andfile
members and as the party’s main chosen means of informing the Czech
public about itself.
107KSČM AS A NEO-COMMUNIST SUCCESSOR PARTY: CZECH REPUBLIC
TABLE 1
KSČM MEMBERSHIP 1990–99
Total % aged % of No. of
membership over 60 workers basic organizations
1990 562,529 39.8 29.9 n/a
(30 June)
1991 355,045 51.6* 21.0* n/a
1992 354,500 n/a n/a 10,669
1993 317,100 n/a n/a 8,530
1995 195,443 n/a n/a 7,030
1997 154,900 n/a n/a 5,826
1998 142,500 70 (est.) n/a 5,545
1999 136,500 n/a n/a 5,406
Sources: Dokumenty I. Sjezdu KSČM, p.10; Dokumenty II Sjezdu KSČM, pp.16–17; IV Sjezdu
KSČM, p.36; Lidové noviny; ‘Draft report of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) on the Party’s work in the period between the
4th and 5th Congresses’. Figures relate to 1 January where not stated.
* Projection based on 12 districts (58,000 members).
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The ‘subcultural’ nature of KSČM is most strongly suggested, however,
by analysis of its electoral and social base. The KSČM itself has
consistently seen its constituency in broad populist terms as all those
‘working people’ (lidé práce) and groups ‘whom the capitalist system
existentially threatens, pushes out to the margins of society and offers no
real chance of change’,64
‘social groups who derive their living from the
results of honest work, in either the past or the present , and from deserved
social benefits. … industrial and agricultural workers …, farmers in
transformed co-operatives, … and other employees’, small businesspeople,
the self-employed and ‘socially weak and threatened groups such as young
people, pensioners and women’.65
From 1992 the KSČM sought to organize
this constituency directly by developing itself into a locally-based left-wing
social movement, a ‘civil society in miniature’,66
around the party’s
organizational network and by sponsoring a Programme of Active Social
Self-Defence (PASS). The PASS strategy sought to establish links between
the party and relevant civic initiatives and organize a range of non-political
activities and services of practical interest to the KSČM target
constituencies (for example, legal advice, social events, and ‘popular’
business ventures [lidové podnikaní]).67
However, the KSČM’s real social base was considerably narrower than
this envisaged broad popular national constituency. Polling from June 1996,
for example, showed that, compared with those of other parties, supporters
were disproportionately likely to be aged over 60 (47 per cent), retired (51
per cent), on a low income (54 per cent) or resident in small or mediumsized
towns (40 per cent). Economically active communist supporters were
more likely to be industrial and agricultural workers or members of the
police and armed forces.68
Moreover, at the level of civil society, as the party
itself conceded as early as 1995, it has been consistently unable to influence
many ‘civic initiatives’ beyond a number of small groups already closely
aligned with the party such as the anti-German Club of the Czech
Borderlands (KČP) or the Clubs of Left-wing Women. The Programme of
Active Social Self-Defence, while ‘relatively successful’ in organizing
social activities, was also admitted to have been in practice incoherent and
lacking in political impact, as were attempts to sponsor new left-wing trade
union organizations.69
A number of further points emerge when we consider the KSČM’s
relationship with its social constituency in conjunction with the nature of the
party’s organization and political geography. The first point of note is the
remarkably high ratio of KSČM members to voters, which in the two most
recent legislative elections (1996, 1998) has been one of approximately
1:4.70
In other words, to a considerable extent, the party’s members and
sympathisers were its electorate. Secondly, we should note the consistently
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high percentage of core voters and the party’s lack of ‘marginal’ support
throughout the 1990s. A poll of April 1998, for example, found that 83.5 per
cent of KSČM supporters had voted for the party in 199671
and that 77 per
cent felt strong or relatively strong attachment to the party, the highest such
figures for any Czech party.72
Finally, as ecological analyses of spatial
voting patterns reveal, the communist vote after 1989 has shown both
remarkable geographical stability73
in terms of localities and a close
correlation with historical (1946) patterns of communist support.74
KSČM
support thus appeared to be based on a distinct historically and
generationally defined group. As Czech sociologists have noted, it is
precisely this communist-oriented generational group, for whom the war
and immediate post-war years were a formative political experience, who
were most favoured by ‘real socialism’ in terms of social mobility and, later,
by structures of remuneration and social benefits.75
KSČM in a Changing Party System: Dynamics of Breakthrough or
Dynamics of Breakdown?
From 1993 until 1999, the KSČM was internally stable and its leadership
secure and solidly supported by its members and voters.76
In this period the
communists maintained their relatively strong position in local politics in
two sets of communal elections (1994 and 1998) and against expectations
also managed to gain a small number of representatives in the Czech Senate
which was elected in 1996 and 1998 on a first-past-the-post basis, by
successfully mobilizing its support in the context of a generally low turnout.
The party was also relatively successful in the first set of elections held for
regional assemblies in late 2000, where both its local organizational
presence and low voter turnout combined to the party’s advantage.
However, the growing left-wing drift in Czech public opinion, detectable
from the mid-1990s,77
failed significantly to benefit the party in electoral
terms at national level. In the (list-based) parliamentary elections the party’s
vote dropped in 1996 from 14 per cent to 10 per cent, losing 13 of the 35
seats won by Left Bloc in 1992, the greatest loss for any party. In June 1998
the KSČM made a modest recovery, polling just over 11 per cent of the poll,
rising from 22 to 24 seats in parliament, and gaining 30,000 extra votes
despite a reduced overall turnout.
In its broader political strategy the party made still less headway.
Throughout the 1990s the KSČM consistently aimed at participation in a
coalition government, either of the centre-left or in a Grand Coalition of all
significant parties, similar to the transitional ‘Government of National
Understanding’ in 1989–90 or the post-war National Front coalition of
1945–48. The 1995 KSČM Congress, for example, spoke of the formation
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of ‘a broad left-wing, patriotic, anti-right-wing grouping’78
and a coalition
government of the left. More recently, in the late 1990s, KSČM leaders such
as Vojtìch Filip, chairman of its parliamentary group, have advocated the
notion of a ‘Government of National Accord’ based on the ‘widest possible
consensus’ – and if possible uniting all parliamentary parties – with a
‘minimum common programme’.79
However, at both local and national
levels other parties and important political actors such as President Havel
continued to regard KSČM as an extremist pariah party, which could not be
considered as an acceptable potential coalition partner. Crucially the Czech
Social Democrats (ČSSD), who emerged as the dominant party of the left in
the 1996 elections, repeatedly ruled out any co-operation with the KSČM,
preferring pragmatic co-operation with the right after inconclusive election
results in 1996 and 1998. Thus, from June 1996, until its disintegration due
to financial scandal in December 1997, the Klaus-led centre-right coalition
government continued as a minority government ‘tolerated’ by the Social
Democrats. Similarly, in June 1998 following early elections, in a reversal
of roles the Social Democrats themselves formed a minority administration
based on institutionalized co-operation with Klaus’s opposition Civic
Democrats formalized via a written ‘Opposition Agreement’.80
However, in late 1999 as the tenth anniversary of the Czechoslovakia’s
‘Velvet Revolution’ approached, to almost universal surprise the KSČM
found itself poised on the threshold of an apparent political breakthrough in
terms of its political support. In 1998–99, against a background of economic
stagnation and growing public disenchantment with both the minority
Social Democratic government and the right-wing parties of the former
coalition, the communists experienced a sudden and rapid increase in
popularity, overtaking both the incumbent Social Democrats and Václav
Klaus’s centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) to become the most
popular Czech party. According to the IVVM polling institute, KSČM
support rose from the 10 per cent it received in the June 1998 election to a
peak of 23 per cent of potential voters in October 1999 before falling back
to 15–20 per cent in 2000.
These shifts in public opinion, which took place at a time when the
KSČM itself had not undertaken any significant political initiatives, can be
seen as reflecting a number of underlying factors. Principal among these
seem to have been the disappearance of the far-right Association for the
Republic–Republican Party of Czechoslovakia (SPR–RSČ) as a political
force in 1998, some of whose voters gravitated towards the KSČM as a
vehicle for protest voting, and the disappointment of many left-wing voters
with the performance of the minority Social Democrat government and the
‘Opposition Agreement’ it had concluded with Klaus’s ODS.81
In more
general terms, however, there was a sense of wider malaise, which brought
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mainstream political discourse closer to the communist rhetoric of ‘crisis’
and, despite deep public divisions over the issue, a growing tendency among
Czech voters to view the KSČM as ‘normal’ party, which should not be
boycotted (according to 47 per cent of respondents in one survey) or
prevented from entering government.82
However, what is of greater interest is the sidelight that the unexpected
surge in support for KSČM cast on internal developments and dilemmas
within the KSČM. The rapidity and scale of the party’s rise in the opinion
polls seems to have taken communist leaders by surprise and their reactions
to it were deliberately muted. Despite hints that the KSČM’s fifth congress
in December 1999 might see a significant public rethinking of party
strategy, the substantive resolutions adopted took almost no account of the
party’s increased popularity.83
Indeed, they painted a relatively pessimistic
picture of an isolated but ‘consolidated’ party, which was in some respects
significantly less optimistic than that given four years previously.84
The congress also seems to have abandoned the grander vista of the
Programme of Active Social Self-Defence: resolutions recognized, for
example, that attempts to create a communist-led trade union grouping, the
Association of Trade Unions of Bohemia and Moravia (founded in 1995), had
conclusively failed, and urged members simply to maintain links with existing
communist-oriented groupings and local non-political associations. In
ideological terms, despite incorporating the notion of globalization and global
opposition to capitalism and slightly softening its language towards
prospective Czech accession to the EU, the resolutions adopted contained few
detectable shifts compared with those of 1995. The party’s leadership also
remained largely unchanged, with Grebeníček re-elected party leader by a
wide margin over his nearest challenger, the more conservative Václav Exner,
a KSČM deputy chairman, who received 23 per cent of delegates’ votes.
Indeed, paradoxically, the rise in support appears to have temporarily
halted leadership plans for some degree of public realignment by the party,
first suggested in a speech by Grebeníček to a programme conference of the
party in early 1999. In this speech he argued that the KSČM was
strategically placed to move from a defensive phase during which it had
consolidated itself as a reinvented but nevertheless recognizably communist
party to a new phase, in which it could win and exercise a share of political
power and in which a degree of adaptation and rethinking might be
necessary. In Grebeníček’s view, the party could thus realistically aim to be
part of a governing coalition at national level within the next ten years.85
Such moves were linked with public attacks by the leadership on the party’s
small but vocal neo-Stalinist wing, the first such criticisms since 1993.
Despite the establishment in 1995 of a separate neo-Stalinist splinter
party, the Party of Czechoslovak Communists (SČK),86
small neo-Stalinist
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groupings such as the magazine Dialogy–otázky–odpovìdi and its ‘readers’
circles’ had continued to function within the KSČM. Moreover, the party’s
tiny youth organization, the Communist Union of Youth (KSM), also
appears to be strongly revanchist in outlook.87
In January 1999 Grebeníček
therefore spoke out against left-wing ‘infantile disorder’ on the part, he
claimed, of some older members whose had failed to understand the party’s
critique of the ‘first historical form of socialism’ or to assess realistically the
changed political situation after 1989. While few in number, he argued,
‘they often make a lot of noise, [and] may end up devaluing the selfsacrificing
work of KSČM members of all ages’ by depicting the whole
party as neo-Stalinist.88
Early 2000 also saw a campaign by the leadership to deregister a number
of local party branches in Prague, which, according to the leadership, were
thoroughly neo-Stalinist and characterized by an atmosphere of ‘cadre
revenge’ and whose members were said to be ‘unable to communicate and
bring in [political] elements which communists had dealt with ten years
ago’.89
However, KSČM leaders’ newly-found desire to challenge and rid
the party of hardline neo-Stalinists and revanchist elements in order to
increase the party’s acceptability and electoral appeal, with its strong echoes
of Svoboda’s abortive campaign of 1992–93, provoked opposition from the
more conservative communists within the party leadership, most notably
Václav Exner, who challenged Grebeníček for the leadership at the 1999
congress. The prospect of electoral growth and, perhaps more distantly, that
of holding governmental office raised by the growing unpredictability of the
Czech party system in the mid- to late 1990s, seems once again to have
brought to the fore the destabilizing conflict between a ‘logic of
constituency representation’ linked to the maintenance of a distinct
communist identity and a strategy of mass organization and a ‘logic of
electoral competition’ centring on vote maximization and office-seeking.
Conclusions
KSČM’s ‘non-social-democratization’ and its adoption of a distinct neocommunist
strategy after 1989 reflected both structural–historical factors,
which had shaped a specific communist tradition in the Czech Lands, and
contingent political choices in the period 1990–93. Key among such choices
were the tactics adopted by both the weak reformist forces within the party
and their neo-communist opponents. However, a critical factor in the
emergence and stabilization of KSČM as a neo-communist party was the
ability of the neo-communist faction to articulate a strategy and ideology,
which were relatively coherent; capable of winning majority support within
the party; and representing an adjustment to the reality of post-communist
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democratic politics. In this respect, the KSČM’s decision in 1993 to adopt a
neo-communist rather than a post-communist strategy represented a
relatively rational adjustment to competing internal, electoral and
conjunctural pressures, which preserved the KSČM organizationally and
politically for much of the 1990s. The party’s success in maintaining itself
allowed it to benefit from subsequent instabilities in the Czech party system
in the late 1990s. However, the party’s continued lack of coalition potential,
reflecting a broader lack of acceptability and legitimacy in Czech society,
remains a fundamental problem for it. Indeed, it seems that without interparty
realignment, the possibility of growth in its electoral support may in
fact be a potential danger to the KSČM. For, in increasing the attractiveness
and viability of a ‘logic of electoral competition’, the surge in support in
1999–2000 seems to have undermined many of the assumptions underlying
the party’s strategy of slowly building on its stability as a ‘subcultural
party’. The dilemma of choosing between – or rather combining – logics of
‘constituency representation’ and ‘electoral competition’ (a dilemma faced
by many contemporary left-of-centre parties in both Western and Eastern
Europe90
) therefore seems likely to reassert itself even in an atypical and
outlying case such as the neo-communist ‘subcultural’ KSČM.
NOTES
1. Atilla Ágh, The Politics of Central Europe (London: Sage, 1998), p. 155.
2. John Nagle and Alison Mahr, Democracy and Democratization: Post-Communist Europe in
Comparative Perspective (London: Sage, 1999), pp.179 and 180 respectively.
3. Michael Waller, ‘Adaptation of the Former Communist Parties of East-Central Europe: A
Case of Social-democratization?’, Party Politics, Vol.1, No.4 (1995), pp. 473–90; John T.
Ishiyama, ‘The Sickle or the Rose?’, Comparative Politics, Vol.30, No.3 (1997), pp.299–330;
Isaac Bigio, ‘The Successor Parties in Eastern Europe: From Social Democracy to National
Communism’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, No. 68 (1998), pp.31–62; D. F. Ziblatt, ‘The
Adaptation of Ex-Communist Parties to Post-Communist East Central Europe: A
Comparative Study of the East German and Hungarian Ex-Communist Parties’, Communist
and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1998), pp.119–37; M. Orenstein, ‘A Genealogy
of Communist Successor Parties in East Central Europe and the Determinants of Their
Success’, East European Politics and Societies, Vol.12, No.3 (1998), pp.472–99.
4. See, for example, P. Fiala and M. Mareš, ‘Česká veřejnost a extremismus politických stran’
and ‘Programová analýza SPR–RSČ a KSČM z hlediska politického extremismu’, in P. Fiala
(ed.), Politický extremismus a radikalismus v České republice (Brno: Masaryk University,
1995), pp.80–94 and 95–110.
5. Herbert Kitschelt, The Logics of Party Formation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1989); Zsolt Enyedi, ‘Organizing A Subcultural Party in Eastern Europe: The Case of the
Hungarian Christian Democrats’, Party Politics, Vol.2, No.3 (1996), pp.379–96.
6. See Herbert Kitschelt, Party Systems in East Central Europe: Consolidation or Fluidity?
(Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1995), and
Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldová, Radoslaw Markowski and Gábor Tóka, PostCommunist
Party Systems: Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
7. Kitschelt, The Logics; Kitschelt et al., op. cit.
8. See David W. Paul, The Cultural Limits of Revolutionary Politics: Change and Continuity in
113KSČM AS A NEO-COMMUNIST SUCCESSOR PARTY: CZECH REPUBLIC
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Socialist Czechoslovakia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); and Jacques Rupnik,
‘The Roots of Czech Stalinism’, in Ralphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds.),
Culture, Ideology and Politics (London: Routledge, 1982).
9. See Rupnik, op.cit. See also his Histoire du parti communiste tchécoslovaque (Paris: Presses
de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1981).
10. Anna Grzymala-Busse, ‘Reform Efforts in the Czech and Slovak Communist Parties and
Their Successors 1988–1993’, East European Politics and Societies, Vol.12, No.3 (1998),
pp.442–71; citations on pp.469 and 443 respectively.
11. Ibid.
12. A full transcript of the relevant Central Committee discussions on 24–26 November 1989 has
been published in Czech: Marianna Krtilová (ed.), Poslední hurá (Prague: Edice Propadliště
dějin/Cesty, 1992).
13. Hastily devised stratagems such as attempts by communist deputies to have the president
directly elected or instructions that communists infiltrate local Civic Forum branches were
wholly ineffective.
14. Jan Obrman, ‘Communist Party Changes its Structure’, Report on Eastern Europe, 2 Feb.
1990, pp.1–2.
15. The ‘federated’ Communist Party of Czechoslovakia continued until December 1991, when
national and political differences, including links between the KSČM and conservative
Communist breakaway groupings in Slovakia, led the Slovak party – renamed Party of the
Democratic Left (SDĽ) in February 1991 – to cut formal ties with the Czech communists.
16. Petr Vilhelm, ‘Zůstat, vystoupit, přestoupit?’, Tvorba, 1990, No.3 (17 Jan.), p.23.
17. Jiří Pehe, ‘Changes in the Communist Party’, Report on Eastern Europe, 30 Nov. 1990,
pp.1–5.
18. ‘Co chystají komunisté’, Svobodné slovo, 25 June 1990, p.3.
19. J. Svoboda, ‘Dopis delegátům’, Haló noviny, 26 June 1993, p.2.
20. Out of 291,783 votes (representing an 82.3 per cent turnout), 221,575 opposed changing the
party name, and 69,007 were in favour. The Democratic Left itself, frustrated at the slow pace
of reform, had already broken away from the KSČM in December 1991 to form the shortlived
Democratic of Labour (DSP): ‘Sebevědomě vstříc voličům’, Naše pravda, 1992, No.10,
pp.1 and 8.
21. See Dokumenty II. Sjezdu KSČM (Prague: ÚV KSČM [KSČM Central Commitee], 1992).
22. Published in full in ‘Za socialismus’, Haló noviny, 27 March 1993, p.5.
23. ‘J. Svoboda oznámil svou rezignaci’, Haló noviny, 11 March 1993, p.1.
24. See Dokumenty III. Sjezdu KSČM (Prague: ÚV KSČM [KSČM Central Commitee], 1993).
25. Svoboda, ‘Dopis delegátům’, p.2
26. J. Svoboda, ‘Strana na rozcestí’, Naše pravda, 1993, No.9 (5 March), p.2.
27. The label ‘neo-communist’ was used by the party in its 1993 congress documents, but was
dropped in 1995 after proving a focus of criticism because of its implications of a break with
the communist tradition .
28. ‘J. Svoboda oznámil svou rezignaci’, p.1. Delegates from the post-communist minority led by
Central Committee member Josef Mečl then left the congress to found a post-communist
breakaway party, the Party of the Democratic Left (SDL).
29. For a fuller discussion see Grzymala-Busse, op.cit.
30. See interview with Svoboda, ‘Mýlil jste se někdy?’, Haló noviny, 23 June 1993, p.1, and
Svoboda, ‘Dopis delegátům’.
31. J. Svoboda, ‘S kým jít a s kým se rozejít’, Haló noviny, 27 Jan. 1993, p.3.
32. Ibid.
33. J. Svoboda, ‘O straně, která je na rozcestí’, Haló noviny, 24 Feb. 1993, p.5..
34. J. Svoboda, ‘Všechny důvody k ofensivní činnosti’, Haló noviny, 8 March 1993, pp.4–5.
35. Zdeněk Masopust and Josef Mečl, ‘Česká politika: prostor a výzva’, Haló noviny, 5 March
1993, p.7.
36. Svoboda, ‘O jedno prosím’, Haló noviny, 23 Feb. 1993, and’O straně, která je na rozcestí’.
37. Masopust and Mečl, ‘Česká politika: prostor a výzva’.
38. Zdeněk Masopust and Josef Mečl, ‘Proč KSČM transformovat?’ Haló noviny, 19 June 1993,
p.3.
39. The largest was the Democratic Left of Czechoslovakia led by Lotar Indruch, itself an early
breakaway from the communist party. At federal level the Left Bloc was a coalition of the
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KSČM and the Slovak communists, now renamed Party of the Democratic Left.
40. In Svoboda’s view the Left Bloc was ‘in embryonic form the co-operation necessary to
achieve social change ... [and] the overcoming of the traditional contradictions between the
communist, social-democratic and Christian-social left’: J. Svoboda, ‘Obhajujeme a
rozvíjíme občanskou společnost’, Naše pravda, 1993, No.4 (29 Jan.), pp.2–3.
41. To this end, in April 1993 Svoboda offered Left Bloc’s participation in the ‘Realist Bloc’ of
left-wing parties proposed by newly elected Social Democrat leader Miloš Zeman. However,
the Social Democrats and all other potential participants rebuffed the offer.
42. Svoboda, ‘O straně, která je na rozcestí’.
43. M. Grebeníček, ‘Přání je otcem myšlenky, Haló noviny, 12 March 1993, p.1.
44. Vratislav Novák, ‘O nebezpečích ohrožujících stranu’, Haló noviny, 28 April 1993, p.1.
45. M. Ransdorf, ‘Nesvoboda pod Svobodou’, Naše pravda, 1993, No. 12.
46. M. Grebeníček, ‘Jsem přesvědčen, že lidé potřebují stranu našeho typu’, Naše pravda, 1993,
No.21, p.3.
47. Ransdorf, ‘Nesvoboda pod Svobodou’.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Grebeníček, ‘Přání je otcem myšlenky’.
51. Kitschelt, The Logics of Party Formation, p.48.
52. See, for example, George Tsebilis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Patrick Dunleavy, Democracy,
Bureaucracy and Public Choice (New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991); Herbert Kitschelt,
The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
53. A key argument made in Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy.
54. For a fuller analysis of KSČM ideology see Seán Hanley, ‘From Subcultural Party to NeoCommunist
Force?’ in A. Bozóki and J. Ishiyama (eds.), A Decade of Transformation:
Communist Successor Parties in Central and Eastern Europe (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe:
forthcoming).
55. A 1995 KSČM Congress report, for example, complains of members’ ignorance of party
policy and a parochial absorption in local affairs, ‘passive reactions, [and] a tendency to wait
for the views of the leadership and approve them without discussion’: IV. Sjezdu KSČM
(Prague: ÚV KSČM [KSČM Central Commitee], 1995), pp.38–44 (p.44).
56. Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organisation and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
57. Enyedi, op. cit., p.379.
58. Ibid., p.378.
59. Figures broadly confirmed by the party’s electoral activity at local level and its reported
income from membership dues: see, respectively, Tomáš Kostelecký and Aleš Kroupa, ‘Party
Organization and Structure at National and Local Level in the Czech Republic Since 1989’,
in Paul G. Lewis (ed.), Party Structure and Organization in East-Central Europe (Aldershot:
Edward Elgar, 1996), pp.89–115, and Markéta Matoušková, ‘Rozpory mezi členy a
příspěvky’, Lidové noviny, 30 Nov. 1995.
60. ‘Draft report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
(KSČM) on the Party’s work in the period between the 4th and 5th Congresses’, p.11
(published on-line in December 1999 at <http://www.kscm.cz/dokument/zpr4-5sje.htm>).
61. Dokumenty II. Sjezdu KSČM, p.36.
62. Ibid.
63. ‘Gottwalda baví práce s lidmi’, Lidové noviny, 2 April 1998, p.3.
64. Za občanskou a sociální spravedlnost (Prague: Ústřední volební štáb KSČM [KSČM
Election Headquarters], 1996), p.1.
65. IV. Sjezdu KSČM, p.44.
66. M. Grebeníček, ‘Předseda M Grebeníček se obrací na členy a příznivce: KSČM a Levého
bloku’, Haló noviny, 29 June 1993, p.2.
67. Vratislav Votova, ‘Aktivní sociální sebeobrana’, Naše pravda, 20 Jan. 1993, p.3.
68. P. Machonin et al., Strategie sociální transformace české společnosti (Brno: Doplněk, 1996),
pp.122–5; ‘Předčasné volby v číslech’, Svobodné slovo, 22 June 1998, and ‘Nejvíc hlasů
nepomohlo Zemanovi k vítězství’, Svobodné slovo, 22 June 1998.
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69. Adam Novak, ‘The Last Communist Party in Europe’, East European Reporter, May–June
1992 , pp.28–9.
70. 626,136 votes in 1996 compared with an estimated 160,000 members; 658,550 votes in 1998
compared with the party’s own figure of 136,500 members in 1999.
71. ‘Čtvrtina někdejších voličů ODS by nyní podpořila US’, Právo, 29 April 1998, p.3.
72. ‘US a DŽJ mají nejmenší voličské jádro’, Lidové noviny, 29 April 1998, p.4.
73. Tomáš Kostelecký, ‘Changing Party Allegiances in a Changing Party System: The 1990 and
1992 Parliamentary Elections in the Czech Republic’, in Gordon Wightman (ed.), Party
Formation in East–Central Europe (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp.79–106.
74. Tomáš Kostelecký, Petr Jehlička and Ludek Sýkora, ‘The Czechoslovak Parliamentary
Elections of 1990: Old Patterns, New Trends and Lots of Surprises’, in John O’Loughlin and
Herman van der Wursten (eds.), The New Political Geography of Eastern Europe (London:
Belhaven, 1993), pp.235–54, and Tomáš Kostelecký, ‘Economic, Social and Historical
Determinants of Voting Patterns in the 1990 and 1992 Parliamentary Elections in the Czech
Republic’, Czech Sociological Review, Vol. 2 No. 2 (1994).
75. See Jiří Večerník, Markets and People: The Czech Reform Experience in a Comparative
Perspective (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p.255.
76. Polling in early 1998 showed that only 13 per cent of KSČM supporters were dissatisfied
with the leadership of Grebeníček: ‘Co si lidé myslí o stranách...’, Týden, 1998, No. 9, p.11.
77. See Petr Matějů and Blanka Řeháková, Turning Left or Class Realignment? The Changing
Relationship between Class and Party in the Czech Republic 1992–96 (Prague: Institute of
Sociology, ‘Social Trends’ Working paper No.1, 1996), and Petr Matějů and Klara Vlachová,
‘Values and Electoral Decisions in the Czech Republic’, Communist and Post-Communist
Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1998), pp.249–69.
78. IV. Sjezdu KSČM, pp.38–44 (p.44).
79. ‘Vojtěch Filip: i kdybychom ve volbách vyhráli...’, Lidové noviny, 2 April 1998, p.3.
80. This agreement was later extended and further formalized in the ‘Patent of Toleration’ signed
by the two parties in early 2000.
81. A STEM poll of July 1999 suggested that 30 per cent of communist supporters were former
Social Democrat voters and the Social Democrats had lost 20 per cent of their 1998 electorate
to the communists: ‘Voliči ČSSD přecházejí ke komunistům’, Lidové noviny, 21 July 1999,
p.2. For fuller details see the STEM on-line archive of party preferences, at
<http://www.stem.cz/scripts/vismo/preference/index.asp>.
82. ‘Vetšina lidí proti izolaci KSCM’, Právo, 11 Jan. 2000.
83. Proposals from some district organizations for new initiatives to capitalize on the surge in
support, such as the proposed appointment of a deputy chairman for youth, were rejected by
the congress.
84. The congress largely conceded that little could be done to stop the slow erosion of the party’s
mass membership and organization, and also noted that it had failed to connect with its
chosen constituencies, including key target groups such as blue-collar workers and residents
of rural areas.
85. ‘Vystoupení předsedy ÚV KSČM Miroslava Grebeníčka na programové konferenci KSČM v
Praze dne 30. 1. 1999’, <http://www.kscm.cz/dokument/gre30199.htm#návestí1> (p.3).
86. In May 1995 Miroslav Štěpán and other expelled leaders of ‘For Socialism’ founded the neoStalinist
Party of Czechoslovak Communists (SČK); however, SČK’s main rationale was to
influence and re-integrate with KSČM, and it has now renamed itself the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).
87. ‘Stalinisté viní Ransdorfa, že je příliš vstřícný ke kapitalismu’, 2 April 1998, p.3; see also
‘Grebeníček: KSČ selhala, proto prišel kapitalismus’, Mladá fronta dnes, 6 Dec. 1999.
88. ‘Vystoupení předsedy ÚV KSČM Miroslava Grebeníčka ...’, op.cit.
89. Jiří Dolejš, head of KSČM’s Prague regional organization, cited in Jitka Götzová,
‘Komunisté podporují rozchod s lidmi, kterí volají po minulosti’, Právo, 13 March 2000, p.3;
see also Jitka Götzová, ‘Grebeníček: Vedení KSČM chce zrušit organizace dogmatikům’,
Právo, 9 March 2000.
90. See Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy.
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