The deadening silence of a regime was broken and life emerged

The students initially dominated the small crowd that began marching in the streets of Prague, November 17, 1989, eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
By the time it had reached Wenceslas Square, in the center of the Czech capital, some 50,000 were now demanding free elections, the resignation of the country’s communist leader Milos Jakes, and an end to the Communist party’s monopoly on power.
Though the demonstrations were peaceful, the security forces responded brutally, in spite of the pleas of the protesters, who chanted your work is to protect us, and we are unarmed.
Some 500 were injured that day near Wenceslas Square, on National Boulevard.
A rumor had quickly spread that a student, Martin Smid had been killed by the police. Though the news was widely reported, including by Jan Urban, a journalist and dissident at the time, it proved to be inaccurate.
No one in fact, had died, yet the news helped stoke the anger that led to the mobilization of thousands, and then millions against the totalitarian regime.
Until that day, there had been a deal between the Communist regime and the people: ‘You shut up and we will take care of you’. But the moment people had the impression that their kids were being killed, the deal was off. As a journalist, I am ashamed of the lie because it was a professional blunder. But I have no regrets because it helped bring four decades of Communism to an end, he told the NYT.
Students went on strike, as did their professors, with the support of artists and intellectuals.
A week later, on November 25 and 26, 700,000 demonstrated in Prague alone.
Protesters were now chanting, you have lost already, and carried portraits of Alexander Dubcek (the leader of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968, crushed by the Soviet invasion on August 21, 1968) and Jan Palach , a young philosophy student who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square, in protest against the Soviet occupation.
The demonstrators now demanded the fall of the regime and free elections. A two-hour nation wide strike was planned for the 27th.
By December 10, the Czechoslovak people had prevailed and a new government now led the nation.
On December 29, twelve years after the emergence of the Charter 77 movement, Vaclav Havel was elected President of the country by a parliament still dominated by the Communists. Another prominent dissident’s life also changed dramatically, on Tuesday I was a boilerman, shoveling coal into the central heating systems of communal blocks, on Saturday I was foreign minister, Jiri Dienstbier told the BBC.
The Charter 77 movement was born in January 1977, following the publication of a manifesto in the Western press that was initially signed by 243 Czechoslovaks.
The civic association, apolitical in nature so as not provoke the authorities, included individuals from all walks of life and with diverse political opinions.
The aim of the movement was simple, if radical: urge the communist government to obey their own laws, in the words of Anna Sabatova, a Charter supporter.
As a signatory of the Final Act of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the UN Covenant on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights, the Czechoslovak government was now legally bound to respect human rights.
Charter 77 is a free, informal, and open association of people of various convictions, various faiths, and various professions who are united by the desire...to insist on the respecting of civil and human rights in our country and throughout the world. The Charter is not an organization; it has no statutes, no permanent bodies, and no organized membership. Everyone who agrees with the idea behind it, who participates in its work, and who supports it is a member, the Charter stated.
Its emphasis clearly, was respect for the law, and all basic human rights. It deliberately shunned politics, and endeavored not to antagonize the communist government, although any independent initiative is always perceived as an intolerable threat by a totalitarian government.
Vaclav Havel became one of the association’s spokesmen.
The promoters of the Charter, oddly enough, had been spurred into action by the arrest and persecution of the members of a local rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe the year before.
Founded in September 1968, the month after the Warsaw Pact invasion, the band rebelled against the process of normalization now underway in the nation, the aim of which was to eradicate all remnants of the Prague Spring (Dubcek’s attempt to invent a socialism with a human face) and its tolerance for artistic freedom, and a certain amount of freedom of speech, and restore communist orthodoxy in the country.
The band, influenced by Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground and The Doors, issued its first album in 1974 called Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned (Bondy being a banned Czech poet whose lyrics were adapted to music by the band).
The rebellious musicians were soon prevented from playing in public and were forced underground, the Bolsheviks understood that culture and music has a strong influence on people, and our refusal to compromise drove them insane, Josef Janicek, the keyboard player, told the NYT.
To be playing music was to be free, to say you are doing what you believe and that you are willing to live with the consequences, added jan Brabec, the drummer.
In essence, the musicians vowed to be faithful to who and what they were, and not to make any concessions come what may, even if that included persecution and prison.
Predictably, the musicians were arrested in March 1976 and tried on September 21, 1976.
They were convicted of organized disturbance of the peace, and sentenced to several months in jail.
The trial caused quite a stir in the country and aroused the indignation of many Czechoslovaks, Vaclav Havel among them, the case against a group of young people who simply wanted to live in their own way was an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom, he said.
The Charter 77 movement was born a few months later, in this climate of anger and resentment against the repressive regime. The defiant and authentic behavior of the musicians, who refused to be intimidated and cowed into submission was to inspire many other people.
They are afraid of old people for their memories. They are afraid of young people for their innocence. They are afraid of typewriters. So why are we afraid of them? went one Plastic People song.
Perhaps this was one of the band’s most enduring legacies: it helped convince the Czechoslovaks that there was nothing to be afraid of.
The Charter 77 activists were harassed and persecuted by the authorities from the outset. Havel was arrested a few days after the manifest was published.
In order to help all those detained for political reasons, a number of Charter 77 activists founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS).
They provided legal support, and sought to publicize their cases abroad.
A number of dedicated and fearless individuals were thus now eager to defend the principles of justice and democracy and ready to accept the consequences.
They knew their day would come. It was only a question of time, and opportunity.
Twelve years later they made the most of that opportunity, thanks in many ways to the Moscow Spring.
In early 1989, before the momentous events that took place in Poland, Hungary and East Germany, elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies took place.
According to a new electoral law enacted by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988, though the majority of seats were reserved for members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, some 10% were to be decided in competitive elections.
As a result, pro-democracy candidates prevailed in most of them, and for the first time in the Soviet era, were allowed to sit in the assembly.
The pro-democracy activists formed a group called the Inter-Regional Group, and were led by Andrei Sakharov, the human rights activist who, until he was freed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986, had been serving a seven-year sentence of internal exile in the city of Gorki. Boris Yeltsin was another prominent member of this faction.
Their goal was to establish a multi-party democracy in what was still the Soviet Union.

As such, confrontation with the regime was inevitable.
At the congress a schism emerged, that was never overcome, between the democratic movement and the reformist wing of the [Communist Party] nomenklatura, which was led by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, said Tatyana Vorozheikina, a Russian political scientist.
Sakharov soon became the most popular politician in the Soviet Union.
Soviet media took advantage of the new climate of reform and published critical articles on the regime.
Tragically, however, the democratic movement was fatally undermined by the death of Sakharov in December 1989. Yeltsin then replaced him and eventually became the first President of the new Russia.
Had Sakharov lived and been elected President of Russia, would Vladimir Putin ever have risen to power and put a halt to, and reverse the movement toward democratization?
For Yuri Vodorin, of the Russian human rights organization Citizens Watch, an opportunity has clearly been missed, and unlikely to reappear any time soon, it was a wave of freedom that we had never seen before, and never imagined that we would see in our lifetimes. But now we have gone backwards, we have departed from this, he told RFE/RL.
What has Putin made of Russia?
It is certainly not a democracy as we understand the term in the West: there is no political opposition to speak of; elections are managed and manipulated by the executive; most of the media and especially television is controlled by the Kremlin, and the economy dominated by groups close to Putin.
According to Andrei Piontkovsy, a Russian political analyst, the country is run and owned by dedicated enemies of freedom, a fact he believes is clearly ignored or overlooked in the West...This system is evolving not in the direction of postindustrial open society, but in the direction of feudalism, when a suzerain distributed and could take at any moment back land to his vassals. The only difference is that Mr. Putin is distributing and taking back not land, but gas and oil companies, he told RFE/RL.
Adam Michnik, a prominent Polish dissident and now editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, described the current Russian regime this way, what is Putinism? Putinism, according to [chief Kremlin ideologue Vladislav] Surkov, is a sovereign democracy. A sovereign democracy means that I am the sovereign; I can imprison all my opponents, in spite of Strasbourg, The Hague, or Brussels.
Twenty years later, even in the Czech Republic the enthusiasm that nurtured and accompanied the Velvet Revolution faded long ago.
The current government led by Mirek Topolanek is but a caretaker government. Last March, he lost a vote of confidence during the Czech presidency of the European Union, which deeply embarrassed the nation…
It was clear that the atmosphere wouldn't last. But what wasn't clear, and what we didn’t realize at the time, was that everything would turn away so sharply -- I wouldn't say from those ideals, but from the atmosphere and social climate at the time, that it would so radically change. That's something we did not foresee, Havel recently reminisced.
Thus, many Czechs and East Europeans have lost confidence in their leaders and in their ability to govern the country effectively for the benefit of all.
The prevalent cynicism has led many to suspect the very motives of their politicians,
But there is clearly a big problem with the political class in the Czech Republic and in many other places in post communist Europe. There's a problem of corruption, there's a problem of pettiness, and there's a sense among the population that these guys are only in it for themselves. That I think is becoming a real cancer in post communist democracies, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash told RFE/RL.
Democracy itself is no longer revered, perhaps because those trapped in totalitarian societies dreamed about it for so long.
When it finally arrived, it failed to live up to all their expectations.
Many people -- perhaps fewer among dissidents or revolutionaries -- thought that if the pressure of a totalitarian police state was lifted, everything would be all right. It was not a utopia, but it was an illusion that democracy solves everything. Democracy does not just solve everything. Democracy offers freedom and basic civil rights. But democracy cannot decide who of us will be happy, Michnik said.
In essence, democracy is always disappointing because it is not an end in itself, but only the beginning, an eternal beginning.
It is only a reflection of ourselves, embodying not only our hopes and aspirations but also our willingness to fulfill them. Democracy, therefore, demands great collective effort, stamina and discipline in order to realize all of its potential.
If we have never known democracy, or experienced freedom as such, then this new status must be frightening and alienating, I have often compared it to being released from prison. In prison everything is laid out for you; you don’t have to decide on anything. They tell you when to get up, what to wear, everything is decided for you by others. If you live in this for years and are then suddenly released, freedom becomes a burden, Havel said.
Learning to cope with the demands of an open, capitalist society after having lived for forty years in a totalitarian entity is a lengthy process, it seems that we need yet another 20 years to become fully emancipated, one more generation that will grow up in freedom, suggested the former Czech dissident Alexandr Vondra.

In the end, perhaps only those born in 1989 or after can ever be at ease in such an open society, and able to thrive within it.
Hence, overcoming the fear, apathy and cynicism engendered by a totalitarian society took longer than many thought, including Vaclav Havel, I admit that I was deeply mistaken to think that it would come earlier. It’s really a task for decades, he said, referring to this adaptation to a new social and economic order.
It is easy to lose sight of the fact that a democratic society cannot survive if we are not sufficiently vigilant and intransigent.
We cannot allow ourselves to compromise with fundamental democratic principles, or we run the risk of evolving toward the Russian brand of authoritarian capitalism (Timothy Garton Ash’s expression).
Respect for the rule of law, at all levels of society is of paramount importance.
Corruption does not flourish in a society that cherishes and enforces the rule of law.
A case in point is Russia, where there is no political will to apply existing laws, leading to a worrisome increase in corruption, which costs the Russian economy an estimated $ 318 billion a year.
A firm commitment to that principle by the authorities would gradually restore the people’s confidence in democracy.
Granted, that is a difficult, time consuming project but an indispensable one if democracy is to survive…
Though confusion and disappointment abound, the Velvet Revolution still inspires pride and satisfaction in many Czechs: what they achieved, and peacefully at that, is remarkable.
They were able to dismantle a totalitarian system without violence, or hatred.
Thanks to them, the word revolution acquired a new meaning.
Ever since the French Revolution of 1789 a revolution was meant to be violent and driven by an ideological blueprint for radical change. The key innovation of 1989 was that radical change was implemented without radical means; that is, without violence. In this way 1989 established a new paradigm of ‘non-revolutionary revolution’ that has been emulated more recently with various degrees of success – or indeed failure – in places as different as Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, or even Iraq, said Stefan Auer, Director of the Innovative Universities European Union Centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
Economic difficulties did not vanish with democracy, and political strife appeared where none, by definition, previously existed.
Such is the unruly nature of democracy.
The Velvet Revolution was about something else, I can say unequivocally it was a change for the better. I'm not talking about the economy or anything like that, but the freedom, that's something incredible, concluded Petr Eckl, of the Magic Lantern Theatre Company.
(the title of this post is an extract from a speech given by former Czech dissident Martin Palous commemorating the Charter 77 movement; the photograph above of the demonstrations in Prague in 1989 is by Pavel Hroch)