The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  The evening news was a revelation. The state-run media had changed sides. After years of shading events, anchors truthfully reported that students were on strike. Martin Mejstrik was given airtime. “Things have gone too far,” he declared on national TV. “There is no longer any room for talk, no other choice but to strike!” The chancellor of Charles University, a pillar of the communist elite, announced that he supported the movement. Students at universities across the country abandoned their classrooms, professors threw out their lecture notes. Theaters went dark as musicians, actors, sound technicians declared their support for the strike, as well. And all this on TV.

  “They are finished,” said Zdenka, shaking her head when Jakes issued a gray communist statement: “We agree with measures taken to maintain public order.” Stupidly, he sided with the thugs of Friday night, for all to see. That night, I went to bed with my windows open, despite the cold, and fell asleep to the myriad jingling of keys from the streets below.

  The Grand Hotel Europa, in the heart of Wenceslas Square, was built at the height of central Europe’s infatuation with art nouveau. A down-at-heel gem of old-world style, from the serpentine ironwork of its balconies to the smoky ambience of its renowned café, the Europa became my home away from home. Each morning I would stake out a table by the windows looking out on the square, order coffee and read the newspapers, meet with friends, conduct interviews and write up my notes on the previous day’s events. Each afternoon, a dapper man in threadbare tweeds and a bow tie would sit down at the grand piano and play lilting melodies from a Europe long gone. Everyone would take a break from overthrowing communism, come in for coffee or maybe a nice Becherova, a bitter Czech liquor, before heading back into the cold to deliver a next blow for freedom.

  The morning of Day Five, all was confusion. Clutches of people stood outside, excitedly talking. The regime must go, all agreed. But who and what would follow? At the table, people debated what kind of society they wanted to live in. “Is capitalism good?” someone asked. In midafternoon, one of the leaders of the strike telephoned, frantic. “We have information from several sources that the army will crack down at three p.m.,” she reported. “Martial law will be declared.”

  Outside in the square, there was no sign of trouble. A row of police vans was parked on a side street, but the men inside casually played cards. One passed a note through a window, drawing a puff on his cigarette: Are you trying to provoke us? it read. The cop laughed easily. Soon thereafter, the communist party’s most outspoken moderate, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, went on television to announce there would be no violence. But it was a dangerous moment. The police were no longer prepared to act against the people, but elements of People’s Militia, a private army employed by factories and the party, had boarded buses and driven into Prague. Adamec issued direct orders barring them from the city center.

  By late afternoon, some two hundred thousand had gathered in the square, shouting, “Down with communism” and “Out with this regime.” Every passing car honked in sympathy—a steady, unremitting blare. They carried on like this for two hours. Just before six, I made my way through the throngs to the third-floor offices of Svobodne Slovo, Prague’s main newspaper, where I was told I could find Havel and his crew. He gave a little nod of greeting, conferring with a dozen aides seated smoking in a circle of chairs before a pair of tall French doors. Then he stood up, wearing a turtleneck sweater and the same shabby army jacket he’d had on when we met in October, and went out onto the balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square. It was the first of what would become daily appearances, climactic moments in the drama he himself was writing.

  A great roar went up, ceaseless and so loud that those of us behind Havel could hardly hear ourselves speak. “The prime minister has guaranteed there would be no use of force,” he told the people. He spoke forcefully, but briefly—how this was the moment, how solidarity coupled with restraint was key. “Thank you all for coming,” he concluded ever so politely. “And see you again tomorrow at four p.m.” A folksinger who had been banned from performing since 1968, Marta Kubisova, then sang. Another thunderous ovation, and everyone headed for home or a pub. “A very well-mannered revolution,” I wrote in my notebook.

  Havel told me on the fly that he deliberately muted his speech, for fear of arousing the crowd. It’s a balancing act, he explained: to keep up the pressure without letting it get out of hand. He feared anything extreme, such as the possibility that inflamed radicals would do something stupid such as storm party headquarters, forcing the police or the military into what everyone called a “Chinese solution.” He also worried that party or police extremists could stage a provocation, a pretext for cracking down. So it was “gently, gently,” as Havel put it. I marveled at this man, who so shyly asked a colleague and me to escort him to the German embassy a few weeks ago. I wondered then whether he would have what it takes to lead a revolution, if and when it came. Watching him so confidently making decisions and uttering the words that would shape the future of his country, I no longer had any doubt.

  So it went. Each day at 4 p.m. the people assembled. Students went about their general strike. The dissidents around Havel plotted and back-channeled with government officials, all but invisibly and always “gently, gently.” I filled my hours, and notebooks, going around town recording scenes of the revolution. One morning, I dropped by the Academy of Dramatic Art, a headquarters of the student opposition, press center, publishing house and hub for national resistance all rolled into one—and run entirely by kids. They dashed this way and that, shirttails out, hair unwashed after days of no sleep or bathing. Xerox machines burned with overuse. One room was the Department of Proclamations. Writers dashed them off with panache, not always getting it exactly right: “We call on all Czechs to join a one-hour general strike from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. on Monday, November 27.” I pointed out the obvious error. “Oh, well. Thousands have already gone out,” I was told, distributed by armies of volunteers. They covered every window, streetcar, lamppost and flat surface of Prague. For a time, police went around at night tearing them down. By now, they had given up.

  I ran across Martin Mejstrik, who had just led a delegation to meet with Adamec. What a transformation. One day, this young man with his Yasir Arafat scarf, army boots and ponytail was organizing a rally at which he expected a few hundred people. A few days later, he was running a nationwide strike and meeting with the prime minister to negotiate the overthrow of a government.

  Another day, I dropped by the Museum of the National Security Police in Ke Karlovu Street. An unsmiling apparatchikita handed me fuzzy bootees to put over my shoes, so as not to scuff the pristine marble floor of this monument to warped humanity. What a trove it was. There was a wall of guns, pointing menacingly outward, allegedly confiscated from 1948 counterrevolutionaries backed by foreign powers. Glass cases displayed hidden cameras, listening devices, secret poison pens and scuba gear taken from a Western spy caught trying to “penetrate” the country by swimming the Danube in 1951. There were “illegal” printing presses and their illicit fare—literature of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a hymnal—and pictures of secret police learning to shoot, snoop and body search. Most bizarre was the stuffed dog Brek, a “dog legend” who served along the border for twelve years. “His extraordinary abilities contributed to more than sixty arrests,” read the plaque on the plinth upon which he stood, teeth bared in an eternal snarl. A medal was impaled in his chest—a modest little postmortem wound, in contrast, say, to that which would be inflicted by the bronzed heroic worker, portrayed in a trashy tableau, poised to spring at his oppressive capitalist boss with a pickax.

  By now, Prague had become America’s favorite revolution. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, the anchors of the big three U.S. networks, found themselves sitting together in first class on the same flight from New York. Meanwhile, hidden diplomacy took its course. One day Adamec flew to Moscow to consult with Gorbachev, as Jakes spoke threateningly of “restoring order.” Not
a chance, Havel’s young foreign policy adviser told me. “The regime knows the Russians will not intervene. They also know that the people know. They’ve crossed a line.” Sure enough, the next day the Soviet ambassador, Viktor Lomakin, called on Jakes for a wholesale “review” of their relationship. Then he ceremoniously welcomed a delegation from Civic Forum to his embassy.

  At the foot of Wenceslas Square, where it meets Narodni Street, stood the theater known as the Magic Lantern. Enter the heavy brass-and-glass doors. Descend a twisting marble stair. Pass through the Theater Club, a salon crowded with people rushing about, smoking, talking self-importantly. Go down another set of stairs and into the theater itself. There, onstage, was the set for Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus, a great wall of papier-mâché rock with a cave for the Minotaur, a hole leading into the underworld. Duck your head, brave the darkness—and emerge into the inner sanctum.

  There, in the backstage dressing rooms and lounges, Havel and an entourage of friends and advisers drafted and redrafted their ever-changing, always improvised script for the Velvet Revolution. In the early days, Havel would write little “tickets” for admission: a smiley face, or some other code for the day, signed by himself. One night, late, I stopped by for a little party in a narrow, dark room whose distinguishing feature was a series of wall-length mirrors reading SMOKING LOUNGE in different languages, with far too many people squeezed inside in a malodorous haze of cigarette smoke, sweat and beer. A grayish-haired man with a clipped mustache pressed me against a wall and introduced himself, in perfect English, as a great fan of Newsweek. This was Vaclav Klaus, an economist. Who do I think is the greatest living American? Milton Friedman, he answered for me. “I am our Milton Friedman.” For the better part of an hour he told me how Czechoslovakia would dismantle its communist-planned economy. Within months, he would become finance minister (and later prime minister) of the new Czech Republic.

  As we spoke, a delegation from Civic Forum, not yet including Havel, was meeting with Adamec. Members of the Politburo were initiating contacts with the opposition. Leaders of the Central Committee had called an emergency session to demand the resignation of the party’s top leaders. “This puts all the pressure on them,” said my friend Jan Urban. “We can afford to wait.” All the while the numbers of people in Wenceslas Square kept growing, to half a million daily by the end of the revolution’s first week—Day Seven, if you were still counting. Havel was astounded. “Half of Prague is out there!” said someone in the little speaker’s room at Svobodne Slovo as Havel prepared for his nightly talk to the crowd. Their shouts made the windows vibrate: “Havel! Havel! Havel!”

  It was intoxicating. Speaker after speaker stepped out upon the balcony and into a sea of … sheer energy. It was a palpable, physical, enveloping thing that you could literally feel and touch. A famous actor, Rudolf Hrusinsky, quoted a scrap of Neruda. The crowd went berserk. Jan Skoda, the publisher of Svobodne Slovo and head of the Socialist Party, spoke out for a democracy. The crowds screamed back, “Free elections! Free elections!” A renowned musician sang a protest song, and the people joined in. I remember looking out over the square, black with people chanting, dancing, waving, cheering. Who could possibly withstand this, who could not join in? Well, I thought, why not? So out on the balcony stepped I. It was only for a moment; just a big wave to the world. But what a moment. Half a million people cheered deliriously, as if I had pushed a button. “Holy shit!” I scuttled back inside.

  That night was the tipping point. Over the past few days, Civic Forum had won promises of support from more than five hundred factories and workplaces. The roll call was read out each evening from the balcony: the Tatra engineering and defense group, the Skoda autoworks, the big CKD steelworks in Prague. To foreigners, these names meant little. To Czechs, they carried totemic power. CKD, especially, was not just any company. It was the General Motors and IBM of Czechoslovakia, the country’s largest employer and the absolute core of the communist party. It was significant enough that CKD had gone over to the opposition. But what happened when its name was read out? Precisely on cue, ten thousand of the plant’s workers came marching into Wenceslas Square. A place of honor had been cordoned off for them, right beneath the windows of Svobodne Slovo.

  What exquisite choreography. Havel stood on the balcony to welcome them, his voice croaking with weariness. “We are at the crossroads of history—again. We are ready to talk but there is no way to return to the previous system of totalitarian government. Our leaders have brought our country to the point of moral, social and economic collapse. We want a democracy and a free Czechoslovakia. We want to rejoin Europe. Today!”

  He closed with his answer to the regime’s threats: an appeal to the soldiers, police and People’s Militia to heed their own conscience, to think for themselves as individuals, to see what was happening around them and act independently of their officers, “first and foremost as human beings and citizens of Czechoslovakia.” It was uniquely Havelian, a call to choice, for personal responsibility, a plea to people as people to give voice to their conscience and act within their own power. This was the velvet in the Velvet Revolution, and it had brought Czechoslovakia to the brink of freedom. With that, he slipped out a back entrance and into a waiting car for the four-hour drive to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. There he would make another speech and prepare for the next day’s performance. It would be the climax of the entire drama.

  On Day Eight—Friday, November 24—silence fell over Wenceslas Square as an aging figure emerged from Czechoslovak history. No one needed to ask who he was or what he represented. He looked much as he did in 1968: a bit older, a bit frail, his face more lined but wearing the same smile, at once ironic, tentative and touching. Alexander Dubcek stood on the balcony of Svobodne Slovo, bathed in television lights, and addressed his countrymen in their capital for the first time in twenty-one years. Quietly, he greeted them. Quietly, he called for democracy and freedom. Quietly, he urged them to throw off the Stalinist regime that had ruled since 1948. Perhaps six hundred thousand people stood for this man in his shapeless dark blue functionary’s coat and rumpled hat. His voice fell into the reverent silence like the snow filtering down from the sky. The silence lasted a few eloquent beats after he finished, then exploded into the most extraordinary single-throated roar I have ever heard. “Dubcek! Dubcek for president! Dubcek to the Hrad!”

  Once again, I was lucky enough to watch all this from a few feet away, in the speakers’ room where Havel, smiling, and others awaited their turn. Dubcek waved, retreated, returned to the balcony to wave again. Surely, he could scarcely believe this was real. He had tried to give socialism a human face, was removed from office by Soviet troops, exiled to become a woodcutter and forester in his native Slovakia, probably thankful that he had not been jailed or worse. Did I see a tear in his eye, as he turned once again to acknowledge the crowd? The rally ended with the singing of the national anthem and that eerily spine-tingling music of half a million people jingling their keys.

  An hour or so later, at the Magic Lantern, Havel and Dubcek emerged from the Minotaur’s hole for a press conference with an assembly of five hundred world journalists. Gone were the fanciful, little handwritten admission tickets. Lately, Havel was guarded, as if he were the diminutive quarterback on a football team of giants, by a phalanx of sturdy Czechs weighing several hundred pounds apiece. They charged in, deposited Dubcek and Havel in chairs onstage, then glowered as the pack of reporters loosed a barrage of shouted questions from every corner. Dubcek had just begun a disquisition on the future of socialism—“I have always stood for a renewal of socialism,” he said, already getting himself into trouble—when Jan Urban jumped up with startling news: Jakes has resigned! The Central Committee has tossed out the entire ruling Politburo!

  Hubbub. Consternation. My notebooks record Czechs falling in the aisles, screaming, whooping, crying. “One question, sir,” a journalist shouted to Dubcek. “What now?” “It’s difficult to speak,” the great man replied
uncertainly, then stood and fell into Havel’s arms. Urban magically produced a bottle of bubbly. “I think,” said Havel, “that it is time for champagne.”

  When, precisely, was the Velvet Revolution won? Those swept up by the events often gave different answers. Martin Mejstrik thought it was the weekend it began, on Black Friday, when twenty thousand people turned up for his rally, rather than the expected few hundred. “I knew then that we had won,” he told me as we walked Narodni Street so many years later.

  For Jan Urban, the moment of victory came at the press conference with the Politburo’s resignation. “That was it,” he would tell me afterward. At the Intercontinental Hotel, later that night, the nation’s new communist leaders held a press conference of their own. The new top commie was one Karel Urbanek, who sat flanked by his peers of the refurbished Politburo. I still remember his looks: gray suit, scared beady eyes, nervous demeanor, a safe provincial functionary from the Central Committee. Someone asked about their plans for resolving the political crisis. “We did not discuss future developments.” Have you read the declarations of Civic Forum? “I will as soon as possible.” Do you believe in democracy and free elections? “We will continue our cooperation with the parties of the National Front,” that is to say the tame parties that don’t challenge communist hegemony. In other words, no.

  At this point, the international media abruptly dropped its pretense of neutrality. “You jerks,” shouted one Western reporter. Another called them “assholes” as someone else cried, “Get lost!” There are sides, and there are sides. Even journalists must sometimes choose. Urbanek and his minions began to twitch, then beat a hasty exit.

  The resignation of the Politburo set in motion a kaleidoscopic chain of events, bewildering in their speed and complexity. Power changed hands, careers were made or lost, in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Already the bunch that had a few days before fled from the Intercontinental were gone. The moderate face of the communist party, Ladislav Adamec, yearned to take their place. Now he, too, was being set up for the fall, but so gently and so deftly.