Taking a cue from the theory that the best way to destroy an opponent is to laugh at his absurdities, former Czech senator Jaroslava Moserová has a plan. With the help of the U.S. Embassy, she intends to serve up such nonsense via an educational project devoted to the ridiculousness of totalitarian rule in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

"The historical memory of people is regrettably short. The young people have no knowledge of the communist past," says Moserová, noting that the Czechs are now experiencing their first new generation of voting-age adults who did not grow up behind the Iron Curtain.

She observes that much of the reason the nation's unreformed Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia surged to second place in the polls earlier this year was not because of old-guard communists, but because of a romantic ideal held by some young adults in their first throes of political awareness — which usually does not include direct experience of communism's brutality.

That's something Moserová personally knows well. She was one of the attending physicians who treated Jan Palach, the Charles University student who torched himself on Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet-backed invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

However, Moserová says, the most effective approach in communicating with these nascent communists may not be to appeal to their collective conscience, but to their sense of humor.

"I think it is easier to reach them through showing the absurdities, rather than the cruelties, of communism," she says.

Moserová, a highly respected translator and physician, recently received a grant from the U.S. Embassy to do exactly that, with plans to use the money to develop a forum quite familiar to the young adults who now lionize communism: the Internet.

She plans to launch a new Web site, www.totalabsurdity.cz, just before the Nov. 17 national holiday. It will actually be her second working of the site, which she originally designed two years ago without any funding (the site is currently on hiatus as it undergoes reconstruction).

The previous incarnation included sections on the maddening tedium of communist life, including photos of items available in grocery and drug stores, excruciating in their intensely noncommercial non-appeal. It also included examples of the bureaucratic forms that often made ordinary life an exercise in rocket-science complexity.

Other examples included such documents as the directive on what could be written in response to situations that openly contradicted official hard-line propaganda.

The order, issued in response to the 1968 Prague Spring invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies, contains a laundry-list of prohibitions: a ban on words such as "occupant" and "occupation," reminiscent of the Newspeak lexicon in George Orwell's 1984; and proscriptions against anything anti-communist, unfavorable to the Soviet Union, critical of the "foreign" army, or even simply the idea of "neutrality."

New material that Moserová intends to develop for the project includes examples of some of the most ironic facets of the communist bureaucracy, much of which had been whispered about at the time through the information grapevine, which provided nuggets of nonofficial news.

Among them: Was there ever, as rumored, a printed pie-shaped timetable for obtaining permission to emigrate, said to be so complicated that the first set of stamps and signatures would expire long before the final stamps and signatures could be affixed — making it necessary to begin the whole process again?

Moserová's own experience as a speaker at an international medical conference serves as another memorable illustration of the regime's humiliations and absurdities. The day that a widely read newspaper reported a shortage of women's panties in Czechoslovakia, Moserová was bewildered when a number of red-faced colleagues handed her discreetly wrapped packages — containing, of course, underwear.

"I had enough to open a shop," she recalls.

Moserová says she will maintain an open quality to the project, accepting whatever examples of life under communism that contributors continue to send.

"We want to show the variety," she says. "The site takes all examples sent from the public."

Beyond content, the site's existence itself may serve as a reminder of communism's repression. Though the Iron Curtain fell a few years before the popular rise of the Internet, few historians doubt that the ousted regime would have sought to drastically curtail its use — similar to the restrictions currently in force in communist China. The project's content, however, will represent a milestone as well.

"I'm not aware of any substantial work on [the subject]," says Czech sociologist Vanda Thorne, whose doctoral thesis focused on daily life under communism. Thorne agrees, however, that younger Czechs remain largely unaware of the past their parents knew.

"There's an attempt of the generation of their parents not to talk about it, because they see it as traumatic," Thorne says. "Little children would be unable even to tell you the names of past communist presidents."

Clearly though, not all young Czechs have forgotten the past.

Gabriella, a 23-year-old from Prague, was seven at the time of the 1989 revolution. "I remember the gray color everywhere; no toys or anything," she says. "I remember the first time I saw a Barbie doll, and I also remember the big queues for food, like bananas, or toilet paper. ... In school I didn't learn anything. We were the generation that could feel it through our parents. We didn't have many questions."

Even at home with her 13-year-old sister, or with her friends, the topic rarely surfaces. "The bad times are over, so we don't need to talk about it," she says.

Asked what stories she heard from her grandparents, 15-year-old Katya from Trebon, south Bohemia, says, "It was controlled and primitive. You had to save up coupons — a ridiculous amount of coupons — to buy a coat. A whole family would be saving up for a year. And fruit, like bananas or oranges, they would only get a kilo at Christmas."

Eva, a 17-year-old from a village called Lomnice, also has few illusions about the old regime.

"In school, we learned that communism was bad, but my parents said just the opposite," she recounts. "Everybody had a job, but there wasn't any freedom to do what you wanted to do. But they don't want it back, not anymore."

Lest memories like these be glossed over, Moserová says she hopes her quest to preserve the dysfunction of communist life will result in more than a virtual museum. Instead, she hopes to one day create a physical archive and a public exhibition.