Thomas Omestad: Remembering the twitchy, terrifying final days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia
[Thomas Omestad is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague for the December 25, 1989, issue of TNR. Read his piece here]
The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful triumph of the people over a stifling authoritarian system--seem certain. For those on the streets of Prague on the evening of Friday, November 17, 1989, it was easy to imagine a tragedy-in-the-making and perhaps a reprieve, of sorts, for a dying regime. The rosy glow of hindsight with which we remember the Velvet Revolution had not yet formed.
Instead, Prague’s old stone streets became a warren of fear, rumor, and violence, as state riot police brutally clubbed student demonstrators. The students had gathered elsewhere to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nazi murder of young protesters, and then had marched into the city center. With many of the students cornered along Narodni Street, the police waded in with batons flying.
The atmosphere of danger extended beyond the main police attack. A couple of blocks away, and perhaps an hour later, I heard a sharp, metallic bang just behind me on the sidewalk. A policeman, holding one hapless protester by his shirt collar and his belt, slammed him headfirst into the side of a bus on which other police sat at the ready. Hearing the bang, the police grabbed their batons and rose up to do battle. When they saw what had just happened, however, they broke into laughter and leaned back into their seats.
Of course, within days, the laughs would be on them and their bosses, the once feared practitioners of repression so characteristic of East Bloc communism.
I arrived in Prague on the 15th, for what emerged as the final days of a sad era. I met dissidents in smoky cafés, their eyes still darting about to scan for eavesdroppers. By the time I left days later, Prague felt something like liberated territory. Politics broke into the open as the suffocating fear lifted.
The morning of the 17th, I went to the grand, old apartment of the late Jiri Dienstbier, a onetime journalist and dissident to whom the regime had assigned the job of stoking coal. He was later to become a foreign minister. On that morning, a handful of students in one of Dienstbier’s rooms were painting placards for the evening protest. I asked him when it might be Czechoslovakia’s turn to push out its rulers. “Who knows?” he said with a shrug and wistful smile. “Maybe tonight.”
He turned out to be right about that.
The Czechoslovak opposition, led by playwright-dissident and later president Vaclav Havel, had long been faulted--even from within its Charter 77 dissident core--as incapable of offering a coherent alternative to the ruling Communists, let alone of mounting a credible strategy of protest and political pressure. The mostly Prague-based intelligentsia had failed to connect with workers and the young in general, who in turn tended toward apathy and passivity, it was said. Yet for all their seeming indecision, these battered yet stubborn dissidents had held on in the face of harassment and indignities, surveillance and prison time. “We were passing a small candle through the darkness,” Dienstbier had told me...
Read entire article at The New Republic
The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful triumph of the people over a stifling authoritarian system--seem certain. For those on the streets of Prague on the evening of Friday, November 17, 1989, it was easy to imagine a tragedy-in-the-making and perhaps a reprieve, of sorts, for a dying regime. The rosy glow of hindsight with which we remember the Velvet Revolution had not yet formed.
Instead, Prague’s old stone streets became a warren of fear, rumor, and violence, as state riot police brutally clubbed student demonstrators. The students had gathered elsewhere to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nazi murder of young protesters, and then had marched into the city center. With many of the students cornered along Narodni Street, the police waded in with batons flying.
The atmosphere of danger extended beyond the main police attack. A couple of blocks away, and perhaps an hour later, I heard a sharp, metallic bang just behind me on the sidewalk. A policeman, holding one hapless protester by his shirt collar and his belt, slammed him headfirst into the side of a bus on which other police sat at the ready. Hearing the bang, the police grabbed their batons and rose up to do battle. When they saw what had just happened, however, they broke into laughter and leaned back into their seats.
Of course, within days, the laughs would be on them and their bosses, the once feared practitioners of repression so characteristic of East Bloc communism.
I arrived in Prague on the 15th, for what emerged as the final days of a sad era. I met dissidents in smoky cafés, their eyes still darting about to scan for eavesdroppers. By the time I left days later, Prague felt something like liberated territory. Politics broke into the open as the suffocating fear lifted.
The morning of the 17th, I went to the grand, old apartment of the late Jiri Dienstbier, a onetime journalist and dissident to whom the regime had assigned the job of stoking coal. He was later to become a foreign minister. On that morning, a handful of students in one of Dienstbier’s rooms were painting placards for the evening protest. I asked him when it might be Czechoslovakia’s turn to push out its rulers. “Who knows?” he said with a shrug and wistful smile. “Maybe tonight.”
He turned out to be right about that.
The Czechoslovak opposition, led by playwright-dissident and later president Vaclav Havel, had long been faulted--even from within its Charter 77 dissident core--as incapable of offering a coherent alternative to the ruling Communists, let alone of mounting a credible strategy of protest and political pressure. The mostly Prague-based intelligentsia had failed to connect with workers and the young in general, who in turn tended toward apathy and passivity, it was said. Yet for all their seeming indecision, these battered yet stubborn dissidents had held on in the face of harassment and indignities, surveillance and prison time. “We were passing a small candle through the darkness,” Dienstbier had told me...