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 WENCESLAS SQUARE The velvet revolution started innocuously enough. On the afternoon of Nov. 17, 1989, thousands of students and sympathizers gathered in Prague to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the closure of Czech universities by the Nazis. The officially sanctioned event broke up peacefully, but trouble started when some 5,000 participants decided to march to Wenceslas Square. At Národní Boulevard, home to Café Slavia, then a popular hangout of Václav Havel and other dissidents, the demonstrators ran into a wall of riot police. Some managed to flee, but about 2,500 others were trapped. They tried to avoid a confrontation by sitting down, lighting candles and chanting: “We have bare hands” and “We don’t want violence.” But to no avail. At 8:50 p.m. they were charged by the police, and almost 600 were injured in the resulting melee. The news of the injuries, and rumors that one student had been killed (that later proved false) galvanized the nation. Wenceslas Square became the scene of a weeklong series of demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands of Czechs. On Nov. 19, Civic Forum, an umbrella group of opposition forces, was formed with Havel as its leader. Within days, the regime crumbled. On Dec. 29, Havel became Czechoslovakia’s President, paving the way for the country’s first free elections in more than four decades
— Jan Stojaspal |
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Europe Then & Now, a TIME photographic exhibition based on this issue, opens Aug. 18, 2003, in the Olivier Exhibition Foyer of the National Theatre, London. |
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E-mail your letter to the editor
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Prague
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Vaclav Havel
Former Czech President and leader of the Civic Forum
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Posted Sunday, August 10, 2003; 16.11BST
Nov. 17 is considered to be the beginning of our velvet revolution, but this day was not a bolt out of a clear sky, though it may have seemed like it.
Throughout the whole of the ’70s and ’80s, foreign journalists visited me, and periodically told me that [dissident human rights movement] Charter 77 was an isolated grouplet of quixotic intellectuals, but that Czechoslovak society was apathetic, the regime conservative, and that nothing could change without factory workers rising en masse against the regime. I kept telling them: be careful, it’s not so simple.
Reality under a totalitarian regime is not always readily intelligible when viewed from a distance. In the absence of freedom of expression, very few have insight into the lower — I would say, subconscious — levels of social life and shifts that occur. No one knows exactly which occurrences will prove to be significant, how they mature, and what they turn into.
No one knows which inconspicuous snowball has the capacity to set off an avalanche, which, to the surprise of all observers, will radically change the political situation. Nov. 17 confirmed my assessment of the situation. The disgust with our conservative communist regime and the desire for change reached such a level that one event was enough to become a snowball that brought down an avalanche with it.
I cannot overstate the importance of the atmosphere of general understanding,
tolerance and self-sacrifice that accompanied those days. To a large degree the atmosphere also reflected the idea of peaceful resistance as embodied by Charter 77. We have been building upon these foundations ever since. They cemented in the foundation of our new democracy — then Czechoslovak, today Czech — certain values, certain ideals that continue to exert their influence.
The first Czechoslovak President, Tomás Garrigue Masaryk , once wrote that states are sustained by those ideals by which they were established. And it may be true in this circumstance as well.
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