Memories & reflections

Velvet Revolution

Czechoslovakia rises up

By Joe Schlesinger

Approximately 200,000 people gather on Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague on Nov. 20, 1989, to take part in a protest. A couple of days later, the Communist leadership of the country resigned. (Peter de Jong/Associated Press)

The Velvet Revolution that brought down the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago is, on the face of it, a contradiction in terms. Political revolutions, after all, are supposedly driven by people angry and desperate enough to resort to violence, not the gentle, celebratory talk-and-song fest that brought down a 40-year-old dictatorship in Prague in a matter of days.

In a way, the Velvet Revolution, which began with a student demonstration in the centre of Prague on Nov. 17, 1989, is only a postscript to the fall of the Berlin Wall a week earlier. Nevertheless, it is a dramatic example of people power, which started with a few brave souls risking life and limb to protest who were gradually joined by the more timid first a few hundred, then several thousand, then hundreds of thousands and finally, a sea of people, a million of them, coming together to clamour irresistibly for freedom.

I was there to witness it, not just as a reporter but also as someone who had a very personal, emotional stake in what was happening. Forty years earlier, I had fled Czechoslovakia to escape Communism, and now, I was back to see the forces of darkness that had pushed me out of my own country crumbling. It was, to say the least, a joyful experience.

It all started with a student demonstration in Prague a week after the Nov. 9, 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall. Ostensibly, the students were commemorating the anniversary of the killing of a university student in 1939 by the country's Nazi occupiers. But the march quickly turned to more immediate and urgent concerns, with hundreds of young voices calling for an end to Communism. The police reacted brutally to break it up. In doing so, they set fire to the long dormant embers of public resentment.

Compared to their counterparts in Poland and other East Bloc countries, Czechoslovakia's Communist commissars had up to then had it easy. They had no groundswell of working-class opposition as Poland did, with its Gdansk shipyard workers and the Solidarity movement, led by charismatic union leader Lech Walesa. In Czechoslovakia, the only human rights opposition was Charter 77, a small, isolated group of intellectuals led by Vaclav Havel, a playwright whose plays were, prior to 1989, never officially performed inside the country.

The Communists harassed the dissidents at every turn, including by throwing them into jail, and made sure their message would not be heard by the broader public. But it wasnt their elitist voices that bothered the regime most. What worried the Communists more were the country's youth and their love of Western music. Jazz and rock concerts had to be staged clandestinely because the regime considered them subversive. When one of the underground rock bands, the Plastic People of the Universe, got too popular, the authorities jailed its members. They were careful not to charge them with political crimes. Instead, they hypocritically convicted the musicians of using unacceptably vulgar lyrics.

Havel on the balcony

Standing on a balcony of Prague's castle on Dec. 29, 1989, playwright Vaclav Havel flashes a victory sign to a crowd of thousands after he was elected president by the first post-Communist parliament of Czechoslovakia. A month earlier, Havel had stood on another balcony in Wenceslas Square, overlooking one of the mass demonstrations that brought down the Communist regime. (Diether Endlicher/Associated Press)

In many ways, the people of Czechoslovakia were better off than most of their neighbours, especially economically. As an industrialized country, Czechoslovakia prospered as a supplier to the Soviet Union, manufacturing, among other things, T-62 tanks for the Red Army. As their Communist rulers took great pains to point out, the Czechs and Slovaks had more and better food than the rebellious Poles, whose store shelves were largely empty. What's more, they enjoyed such bourgeois perks as country cottages, which the Communists tolerated as an outlet on which city dwellers could lavish all the energy and devotion they did not invest in their jobs and their dreary, state-owned apartments in town.

By the 1980s, though, with dtente between Moscow and Washington and Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost reforms in the Soviet Union, the crumbs of loosening restrictions being thrown their way were no longer enough for the denizens of Moscow's satellite states. And so, the unravelling of Communism gathered speed. Poland. Hungary. Germany. Then, Czechoslovakia.

The violent break-up of the student demonstration in Prague happened on Friday, Nov. 17, 1989. The next day, there were 2,000 demonstrators in Wenceslas Square, the heart of Prague, shouting for freedom. On Sunday, 10,000. By Monday, when I arrived from Berlin, it was more than 100,000, a crowd too large for the authorities to disperse without causing a massacre. So, the cops just gave up and abandoned the centre of the city to the demonstrators.

That Wednesday, Vaclav Havel, who had formed a new opposition group called Civic Forum to negotiate with the Communist government, appeared on a balcony overlooking the square, to the cheers of a crowd of 200,000 below. Beside him stood singer Marta Kubisova, whose music had been banned by the Communists, singing a song based on a 17th-century Czech prayer that she first sang during the Soviet invasion of 1968 and that 21 years later became the anthem of the Velvet Revolution.

"Now that the power you lost to govern your own affairs is coming back to you, my people, coming back," she sang. "Let this, my prayer, speak to hearts not blighted, as buds by frost, by evil times … May peace remain with this land. May malice, envy, hatred, fear and strife pass away, may they finally pass away."

In the square, tears and stillness. Lips moved soundlessly to the words. Tens of thousands of hands rose in the V-for-victory salute. For the Communists, it was all over. A week after the first student demonstration, the Communist leadership resigned. The next day, a million people gathered on a huge field overlooking the city to cheer and sing in celebration of their sudden freedom.

For Czechs and Slovaks, it was the beginning of a new life. For me, an end to the bitterness at the loss of roots that never left me, even as I found a much happier life in Canada. What happened in Prague that November 20 years ago felt, and still feels, like a personal vindication.