The fall of communism is commemorated by the Czechs on 17 November, the day in 1989 when, after more than 40 years, the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia began to collapse. The commemorations of the events 32 years ago have taken a somewhat somber undertone, as people who contributed to the fall of the dictatorship are gradually leaving us.
Saturday, 18 December, the Czechs marked ten years since the day Václav Havel, the symbol of the Velvet Revolution and the first president of free Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, died in his country house. His legacy still lives on, as was evident from the hundreds of candles that people lit that day at his grave and at other places associated with him.
Meanwhile, shortly before the anniversary, the journalist Petr Uhl, another prominent dissident who was convicted along with Havel in the 1979 political trial of members of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted, died; he spent a total of nine years in prison between 1969 and 1989. Havel was jailed for about five years and was last paroled in May 1989. Seven months later he became president.
The communist regime in Czechoslovakia cracked down on its critics until the very end. While the situation in the Soviet Union had been easing for several years under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbatchev, the Czechoslovak communists avoided reformist steps. The country had been occupied by the Soviet army since the August 1968 invasion and the local leadership was used to receiving orders from Moscow, but these were not coming now.
The first significant clash between the authorities and disaffected citizens had already taken place in January 1989 on the 20th anniversary of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a student whose act was an attempt to rouse society from its indifference following the Soviet invasion. This succeeded only in the short term, and gradually the majority submitted under the influence of repression, purges and relative material abundance.
The so-called Palach Week was the first major action of resistance; the demonstrations lasted five days and were repeatedly brutally cracked down by the repressive forces. Hundreds of people were detained, including Havel.
The revolution itself broke out on 17 November. On that day, a rally was announced to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nazi closure of Czech universities. The event was co-organised by the Socialist Youth Union, so the regime did not ban it, but warned that the subsequent march should not lead to the city centre. The official part took place without major incidents, although anti-regime slogans were already being raised. However, some people, mainly students, headed back to the city centre after the march was over. The security forces finally blocked the way to the crowd of many thousands on Národní třída and then closed the area completely. At first, people were still free to leave, but later that was not allowed. Some demonstrators sat down on the ground in front of the riot police, chanting “We have bare hands” and other slogans expressing the non-violent nature of the rally. Some were detained, others were gradually released and beaten with batons as they left the area. More than five hundred people were injured.
"I told myself that I didn't want to die here, and at that moment I decided to go against the cordon of police, that they couldn't kill me. This one guy, who was maybe the same age as me, let me pass, he didn't hit me with the baton, he just looked at me and sort of cleared the way. But the one behind him had already beaten me quite brutally, because then I had two broken ribs," Klára Pospíšilová, a student at the time, later recalled.
Milan Podobský, at the time a student of journalism, had his head and eye injured: "Everyone said we had bare hands, I raised mine late or stupidly, I didn't cover my head, so the baton swung across my face, I didn't even pick up my glasses."
Information about the brutal intervention spread quickly and provoked a strong public reaction. It was also helped by a false report that one of the students had died during the crackdown - as it later turned out, witnesses had apparently seen a StB secret police agent faint as he mingled with the students. The students went on strike in protest against the brutality of the regime and were joined by actors from Prague theatres.
On Sunday 19 November, Václav Havel called together representatives of various opposition groups to agree on a common course of action. A broad platform called the Civic Forum emerged, whose representatives met with Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec the very next day.
It was on Monday 20 November that a series of mass demonstrations began in Czech and Slovak cities – over 100,000 people gathered on Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague that day. Most of Prague's universities went on strike that day.
On Tuesday, 200,000 people were already on Wenceslas Square, with public appearances of the recently imprisoned Václav Havel and the singer Marta Kubišová, who had not been allowed to perform for twenty years because of her opposition to the Soviet occupation. Mass demonstrations were repeated daily in Prague and other cities.
In those days, the central authorities were deciding whether and how to intervene. However, no such decision was made, the regime no longer confronted the demonstrators with force, and there was no more bloodshed after the crackdown on Národní třída.
On the contrary, on 24 November, a week after the brutal crackdown on Národní třída, Milouš Jakeš, the General Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, resigned, and with him the entire leadership, but the Civic Forum called the changes insufficient.
On Saturday, 800,000 people gathered on Prague's Letna Plain. The protest was broadcast live for the first time on Czechoslovak Television, which also signed up to the planned strike.
The following day, the demonstration was addressed not only by Václav Havel but also by Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, who spoke from the podium to discourage a general strike. In the evening of the same day, he held talks with Václav Havel for the first time.
"We expected stiff resistance, but he was unexpectedly constructive. There was no hatred or hostility from him. For example, we wanted him to release political prisoners, he said fine, give me the list..." Havel's secretary Vladimír Hanzl recalled later.
On Monday, 27 November, a two-hour general strike actually took place, with about three-quarters of the citizens participating.
In the following days, the Communist Party came up with further concessions that would allow it to continue to govern.
This was no longer acceptable to society, so on 10 December President Gustáv Husák appointed the first government in more than 40 years in which the Communists did not have the upper hand. He subsequently resigned himself. Parliament elected a new head of state on 29 December – it was Václav Havel, with even the Communist deputies voting for him. By that time, democratization was already underway, the Iron Curtain had fallen, the article on the leading role of the Communist Party had been dropped from the Constitution, negotiations on the withdrawal of Soviet troops had begun, and society was heading towards its first democratic elections.
Havel enjoyed enormous popularity at the time. He resigned from office in mid-1992, when it was clear that Czechoslovakia would break up, which he tried in vain to prevent.
He was then elected twice more as President of the independent Czech Republic, leaving office in 2003 and as a farewell he had a large glowing heart, one of the symbols associated with him, erected above Prague Castle, the presidential residence.
Even after all these years, Czechs still consider Václav Havel to be the most significant figure of the post-revolutionary development and the best president since 1989, but his legacy is – as it is usually the case with significant personalities – controversially received. About a fifth of the population, on the other hand, consider him the worst. Even the post-revolutionary development is not perceived unequivocally; the Communist Party was in Parliament continuously until this autumn. However, other extremist parties are also critical of Havel's legacy, such as the SPD.
In a similar proportion, the citizens are divided in their retrospective assessment of the post-revolutionary development. Sixteen percent of people consider the situation to be worse and twenty percent the same. However, the majority (64 percent) consider the current regime to be somewhat or much better.
For years, the country’s rulers had been drifting away from Havel’s legacy, but now his shadow looms large once more, as the newly formed coalition signaled its intention to return to the same type of foreign policies. With the Communists out and Havel back in, it seems that, at a symbolic level, the Revolution was finally concluded.
