The Velvet Revolution: Prague, 1989
1989 · event
On 17 November 1989 a student march in Prague, held to mark fifty years since the Nazi closure of the Czech universities, was stopped by riot police on Narodni trida and broken up with force. Word spread through the city and the country overnight. Theatres cancelled performances and opened their stages for discussion, students went on strike, and within a week hundreds of thousands of people were gathering in Wenceslas Square, shaking their key rings in the cold so that the sound carried across the crowd.
Czechoslovakia had been governed by a hardline leadership since the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Opposition had survived in small circles, above all around the Charter 77 declaration and the playwright Vaclav Havel, who had spent years in prison. In the days after 17 November these circles became the Civic Forum in the Czech lands and Public Against Violence in Slovakia, and they negotiated on behalf of a movement that had appeared almost overnight.
By 27 November a general strike of two hours brought the country to a stop. Two days later parliament removed the article of the constitution that guaranteed the leading role of the Communist Party. A new government was formed in December, Havel was elected president on the twenty ninth of that month, and free elections followed in June 1990.
The revolution took six weeks and cost no lives, which is why it was named for velvet. The country divided peacefully three years later into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the events of 1989 are marked in both states as a national holiday. The image that stays is not a barricade but a square full of people ringing keys, telling a government that its time was up.