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Velvet Revolution

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A rumor about a dead student sparked the end of communism in Czechoslovakia. The student wasn't actually dead—he wasn't even a real person. But in those eleven days of November 1989, the truth mattered less than what people believed. And what they believed was that their government had finally crossed a line.

The Night Everything Changed

November 17, 1989 was International Students' Day, a date chosen to commemorate something that happened exactly fifty years earlier. In 1939, after Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, students in Prague had demonstrated against the occupation. The Nazis responded with characteristic brutality: they stormed the universities, arrested twelve hundred students, and killed nine. The anniversary had become an official day of remembrance.

By 1989, Czechoslovakia had been under communist rule for forty-one years. The Communist Party controlled everything—schools, newspapers, factories, theaters. Citizens who stepped out of line faced consequences. Your children could be denied university admission. Your books could be banned. Your career could end overnight.

So when fifteen thousand students gathered that afternoon to mark the anniversary, they weren't just remembering the past. They were testing the present.

The Socialist Youth Union, officially a proxy of the Communist Party, had organized the demonstration. Most of its members privately opposed the communist leadership but were terrified of saying so. This march gave them cover. They could gather in large numbers and express their opinions while technically participating in an approved event.

The students walked to Vyšehrad Cemetery to visit the grave of Karel Hynek Mácha, a beloved Romantic poet. That was the official end of the march. But then they kept walking—into the center of Prague, carrying banners and chanting anti-communist slogans.

At around half past seven in the evening, they reached Národní Street.

Riot police were waiting.

The Hoax That Changed History

The police blocked all escape routes and attacked. Students were beaten. Among the chaos, a secret police agent named Ludvík Zifčák ended up lying motionless on the street. He hadn't been killed—he had simply fainted. But police carried his limp body to an ambulance in full view of witnesses.

That night, a woman named Drahomíra Dražská sat waiting for treatment for injuries she'd received during the riot. She worked at a local college. In the atmosphere of fear and confusion, she made up a story: a student named Martin Šmíd had been killed by police.

There was no Martin Šmíd.

But Dražská shared her fabrication with several people the next day, including the wife of a journalist who worked for Radio Free Europe. The story spread. By evening, Radio Free Europe was reporting that a student had been killed by police during the demonstration.

It wasn't true. But people believed it. And that belief mobilized them in ways that decades of quiet discontent never had.

Forty-One Years of Control

To understand why a single rumor could spark a revolution, you need to understand what life under communist Czechoslovakia was like.

The Communist Party had seized power on February 25, 1948. After that, there were no opposition parties. The state owned everything—all schools, all media, all businesses. If you wanted to publish a book, the state had to approve it. If you wanted to travel abroad, the state had to approve it. If you wanted to listen to foreign music, that was forbidden entirely.

The government maintained elaborate blacklists. You could end up on one for all sorts of reasons: having family members who lived in Western countries, supporting Alexander Dubček during the brief reform period known as the Prague Spring in 1968, opposing the Soviet military occupation that followed, promoting religion, boycotting elections (which were rigged anyway), or signing Charter 77.

Charter 77 was a manifesto published in 1977 that criticized the government for failing to implement human rights commitments. Its signers were systematically persecuted. Even associating with someone who had signed it could ruin your life.

These rules were easy to enforce because the state controlled everything. Your boss reported to the state. Your teacher reported to the state. Your neighbors might report to the state. The blacklisting system became a weapon that people used against rivals, accusing each other of ideological impurity.

But by the late 1980s, cracks were appearing.

The Thaw That Wasn't

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and introduced two policies that would reshape the communist world: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Gorbachev believed the Soviet system needed reform to survive.

The Czechoslovak communist leadership said all the right things about supporting perestroika. They changed almost nothing. Any discussion of the Prague Spring—that brief period in 1968 when reform seemed possible before Soviet tanks rolled in—remained absolutely forbidden.

The first anti-government demonstrations began appearing in 1988. The Candle Demonstration, for instance, saw citizens gathering to protest. Police dispersed these gatherings and punished participants.

But something had shifted. Citizens who had been complacent for decades started expressing their discontent openly. When the dissident playwright Václav Havel was imprisoned in 1989, numerous important figures and ordinary workers signed petitions calling for his release. A petition circulated that summer calling for an end to censorship and fundamental political reform.

People were finding their courage.

The Dominoes Begin to Fall

Czechoslovakia didn't exist in isolation. Throughout 1989, the communist bloc was coming apart.

Starting in August, East German citizens began occupying the West German embassy in Prague, demanding to be allowed to emigrate to the West. On November 3rd, thousands of East Germans left Prague by train, heading for West Germany through a circuitous route. Six days later, on November 9th, the Berlin Wall fell. East Germans no longer needed the detour.

Czechoslovaks watched all of this on television—both foreign channels and domestic ones. By mid-November, many of their neighbors had begun shedding authoritarian rule. Poland had held partially free elections. Hungary had opened its border with Austria. The pressure was building.

Even the Soviet Union supported a change in Czechoslovakia's ruling elite, though they didn't anticipate the communist regime being overthrown entirely. They expected managed reform, not revolution.

Eleven Days in November

After the police violence on November 17th and the false reports of a dead student, events accelerated with stunning speed.

Students and theater actors agreed that same night to go on strike. Two students visited Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec at his private residence and described what had happened on Národní Street. Theaters declared strikes and opened their stages not for performances but for public discussions.

On November 18th, students from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague launched a formal strike. University students throughout Czechoslovakia joined them. Actors read proclamations to their audiences instead of performing plays, calling for a general strike on November 27th.

Because the Communist Party controlled all mass media—radio, television, newspapers—the students had to spread their message another way. They made posters by hand and posted them throughout the cities.

That evening, Radio Free Europe reported the death of Martin Šmíd. The report was false, but it convinced hesitant citizens to join the protests. Fear was giving way to outrage.

Public Against Violence, Civic Forum

On November 19th, about five hundred Slovak artists, scientists, and community leaders gathered in Bratislava. They denounced the attack on students and formed an organization called Public Against Violence, which would lead the opposition movement in Slovakia.

That same day in Prague, actors, audience members, and prominent dissidents including Václav Havel established Civic Forum. This would become the equivalent organization for the Czech lands. Civic Forum demanded the dismissal of officials responsible for the violence, an independent investigation, and the release of all political prisoners.

On television, government officials called for calm and a return to normal business. They broadcast an interview with the supposedly dead Martin Šmíd to prove that no one had been killed, but the recording quality was poor and rumors continued to spread. It would take several more days to confirm definitively that no one had died.

By then, it no longer mattered.

The Numbers Keep Growing

On November 20th, the first mass demonstration in Prague drew a hundred thousand people. In Bratislava, demonstrators gathered for the first time. Students and actors traveled to factories inside and outside Prague to build support among workers.

The next day, November 21st, the first official meeting between Civic Forum and Prime Minister Adamec took place. He agreed to guarantee that no violence would be used against the people. But he also made clear he would "protect socialism, about which no discussion is possible."

In Bratislava, Alexander Dubček made his first public appearance of the revolution. Dubček had been the face of the Prague Spring twenty-one years earlier, the reform communist whose experiments with "socialism with a human face" had been crushed by Soviet tanks. He had been expelled from the party and forced to work as a forestry inspector. Now he was back.

On November 22nd, Cardinal František Tomášek, the Roman Catholic primate of the Bohemian lands, declared his support for the students and criticized the government. At a meeting of Public Against Violence, someone finally voiced the "radical" demand openly: abolish the constitutional article that established the "leading role" of the Communist Party.

That evening, Miloš Jakeš, the chairman of the Communist Party, gave a special address on television. He insisted that order must be preserved and that socialism was the only alternative for Czechoslovakia. During the night, the party summoned four thousand members of the People's Militias—a paramilitary organization directly controlled by the Communist Party—to Prague to crush the protests.

Then they called them off.

Five Hundred Thousand

On November 20th, two hundred thousand protesters had gathered in Prague. The next day, the number reached five hundred thousand.

Half a million people in the streets of a single city.

The Civic Forum announced a two-hour general strike for November 27th. Leaders of the Democratic Initiative presented demands including the resignation of the government and the formation of a temporary government composed of members who hadn't been compromised by the old regime.

November 24th brought the moment everyone had been waiting for. The entire top leadership of the Communist Party—including General Secretary Miloš Jakeš—resigned.

Forty-one years of one-party rule were ending.

The Final Days

On November 27th, the general strike happened. For two hours, all citizens of Czechoslovakia stopped working. The whole country stood still in unified protest.

The next day, November 28th, the Communist Party announced it would relinquish power and end the one-party state. The party that had controlled every aspect of Czechoslovak life for four decades simply gave up.

Two days later, the federal parliament formally removed the sections of the Constitution that had given the Communist Party a monopoly on power.

In early December, workers began removing the barbed wire and other obstructions from Czechoslovakia's borders with West Germany and Austria. The Iron Curtain was being physically dismantled.

On December 10th, President Gustáv Husák appointed the first government since 1948 that wasn't dominated by communists. Then he resigned.

On December 28th, Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament. The man whose reforms had been crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968 was back in power.

The next day, December 29th, 1989, Václav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia. The dissident playwright who had spent years in prison, whose works had been banned, whose name couldn't be mentioned in official media, was now the head of state.

The Velvet Divorce

In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946. Citizens who had never known anything but communist rule went to the polls and chose their own leaders.

But the story didn't end with simple triumph. On December 31, 1992, Czechoslovakia peacefully ceased to exist, splitting into two independent countries: the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.

This division, sometimes called the "Velvet Divorce" to echo the Velvet Revolution that preceded it, happened primarily because of governance disputes between Czechs and Slovaks. The two groups—the major ethnicities comprising the former country—couldn't agree on how power should be shared in the new democratic state.

It was a peaceful separation, conducted through negotiation rather than conflict. In that sense, it honored the spirit of the revolution that had made it possible.

Why "Velvet"?

The revolution earned its name from its remarkable lack of violence. In Czech, it's called sametová revoluce—the velvet revolution. In Slovak, nežná revolúcia—the gentle revolution.

Consider what didn't happen. The army wasn't called out to massacre protesters. The secret police didn't launch a campaign of arrests and disappearances. When the general strike occurred, there were no violent confrontations. When the Communist Party announced it would give up power, there was no fighting in the streets.

Eleven days. From the police attack on November 17th to the Communist Party's surrender on November 28th. Eleven days to end forty-one years of totalitarian rule.

It happened so quickly partly because of what was happening elsewhere. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Poland and Hungary were already transforming. The Soviet Union was signaling that it wouldn't intervene to prop up satellite regimes. The communist leaders of Czechoslovakia could see which way history was moving.

But it also happened because ordinary people overcame their fear. The secret police had kept citizens in line for decades through the threat of consequences—lost jobs, banned children, ruined careers. When enough people decided they were no longer afraid, when half a million gathered in a single city, those threats lost their power.

The Power of Showing Up

A member of the civic initiative met with Prime Minister Adamec during those eleven days. Adamec told them something revealing: he had twice tried to resign his post and been prohibited from doing so. He said that real change required mass demonstrations like those in East Germany—some 250,000 people.

He asked them to keep the number of "casualties" during the expected change to a minimum.

The Prime Minister of a communist country was telling opposition leaders that he knew change was coming and was asking them to help make it peaceful. The system was already acknowledging its own end.

What the opposition provided was numbers. Bodies in the streets. Citizens willing to be counted. Two hundred thousand, then five hundred thousand, then a general strike that stopped the entire country.

There's a cruel irony in how the revolution began. The false rumor about Martin Šmíd—the student who never existed, who never died—mobilized people who had been afraid to act. They believed their government had killed a young person for demonstrating, and that belief pushed them past their fear.

The truth came out eventually. No one had been killed on November 17th. But by the time everyone knew that, the revolution had already won.

What Came After

Václav Havel, the playwright and dissident who became president, would serve in that role until 2003. Alexander Dubček, the reformer crushed in 1968, served as speaker of parliament until his death in a car accident in 1992.

Czechoslovakia's transition wasn't without difficulties. The economic transformation from a command economy to a market system created winners and losers. The political disputes between Czechs and Slovaks ultimately split the country. Former communist officials found their way into the new economic order, sometimes with suspicious ease.

But no one was executed. No civil war erupted. The barbed wire came down, the borders opened, and people could finally travel, speak, write, and vote without fear.

The Velvet Revolution demonstrated something that seems almost impossible: a totalitarian system that controlled every aspect of society could collapse in less than two weeks, without significant bloodshed, through the simple act of citizens refusing to be afraid anymore.

It started with a lie about a dead student. It ended with a playwright in the presidential palace. The eleven days in between changed the lives of fifteen million people—and showed the world what peaceful revolution could look like.