The next day, at a larger Party meeting, his resignation was officially accepted and Mladenov was formally elected in his place. At the end he was standing, alone, at the lift, waiting to leave the building. The man who had held power for thirty-five years, removed thousands of his enemies, and had allegedly stashed away upwards of US $100 million in Swiss banks for himself and his family, cut a pathetic figure. Mladenov went to him to try to say a consoling word. Zhivkov brightened up for a minute and stayed true to his character. ‘He started making several demands . . . could he continue to stay in his official residence, in Banyka, near Sofia . . . could he have a smaller residence . . . he asked about his pension . . . I said he could do as he pleased,’ said Mladenov.6
Zhivkov’s dictatorship was over. But the Communists tried to keep their monopoly on power. Mladenov made it clear that he proposed to stay in office and so would all the Party chieftains. It seemed that the principal beneficiaries of the coup would be the conspirators who ousted Zhivkov. Bulgarians felt cheated. They had watched Soviet TV and seen the crowds on the streets in Berlin. A wave of protests swept through the country on a scale never seen before. ‘The coup had worked for them,’ said Stefan Tafrov, a spokesman for the hastily formed Union of Democratic Forces, and later an Ambassador to the UK and to Paris. ‘We had to find something that would work for us.’ Massive demonstrations over the next three weeks forced Mladenov - like the East Germans before him - to cave in, start serious talks with the opposition and agree to democratic elections the following spring.7
FORTY-SEVEN
THE VELVET REVOLUTION
Prague, Friday 17 November 1989
IT WAS RITA KLIMOVA who invented the phrase ‘Velvet Revolution’. A petite, blonde, one-time politics lecturer at Prague’s ancient Charles University, she was the formidably erudite spokeswoman for the opposition that bustled the Communists out of power in Czechoslovakia. Klimova spoke impeccable English, but in a Manhattan accent with West Side idioms; she had been to school in New York where her father, the left-wing writer Batya Bat, had fled to escape the Nazis in 1938, when she was an infant. The family returned to Prague soon after the war. Her story was fairly typical for a Czech dissident of the 1980s. She had been a convinced Communist, like her husband Zdenek Mlyná, who had shared digs and a close friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev at Moscow State University in the 1950s. He rose high in the ranks of the Party, and she in academia, until the Prague Spring was crushed. Then they both lost their jobs - and their idealistic faith that communism could offer any hope for mankind. In the harsh years of ‘normalisation’ she found work as a translator, became active in Charter 77 and was a firm friend of Václav Havel.
The fiercely intelligent Klimova could occasionally look stern and forbidding, but at fifty-eight she had a large girlish streak and a sense of fun. As Klimova used to say, it was fun that characterised the Velvet Revolution and made it so different from the others in Central Europe in the summer and autumn of 1989. Defeating the Communists was a serious matter. Nobody doubted that. But in Czechoslovakia it was done with plenty of music, wit, humour, laughter and a little absurdity, much of it scripted by a celebrated playwright. It happened with astonishing speed. As the acute observer on Central Europe Timothy Garton Ash pointed out, ‘In Poland it took ten years; in East Germany ten weeks; in Czechoslovakia ten days.’ Barely a month earlier, in mid-October, the Czech Communist Party chief, Miloš Jakeš, was assuring his fellow Communist oligarchs that ‘we’ll be all right. As long as the economy holds up here, and there’s food on the shelves.’ He was fooling himself. Like his peers in Berlin and Leipzig, by the time the hapless Jakeš and his colleagues in Prague Castle grasped what was happening to them it was too late to do anything about it.1
For a week after the Wall fell there had been an uneasy quiet in the Czech capital. Everyone had seen the pictures from the Brandenburg Gate, just 200 kilometres away. Communism in East Germany had collapsed. The Party had been defeated and was now negotiating the details of its capitulation. The comrades in Prague still imagined that somehow they could cling on, that the ‘infection’, as Vasil Bil’ak, one of the leading neo-Stalinists in the Czech leadership, called it, would not spread. They did not seek to negotiate with the opposition. Instead, they put the riot police and the StB on full alert. A secret report to the Czech Deputy Interior Minister in charge of security, Rudolf Hegenbart, written after the Wall was breached, detailed the preparations the security forces were making ‘to protect peace and stability against enemy elements, rowdies and counter-revolutionary forces’. Round-the-clock patrols in known troublespots in the centre of the city would increase. ‘We were living in a different place from the rest of the world’s population, in a bubble of our own,’ said one old comrade, who confessed that he did not see what was about to happen, despite all the evidence in front of him.2
Students sparked it. They had been given permission, through the official Communist Youth organisation, the SSM (Socialist Union of Youth), to hold a rally marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jan Opletal. The regime had wanted to ban the march. But it could find no plausible reason. Opletal had hero status in People’s Czechoslovakia. The Communists had used his name in anti-fascist propaganda for four decades. He was shot by the Germans at a demonstration against the Nazi occupation, after which 1,000 of his fellow Czech students were sent to concentration camps and all Czech universities were closed for months. Three weeks before the anniversary march, a route was agreed between the SSM organisers and the police which avoided the centre of the city and would end at the National Cemetery at Vyšehrad, burial place of Dvoák, Smetana, a host of other Czech notables, and Jan Opletal. More than 50,000 well-behaved people had joined the march. The shouts heard most often were ‘Remember 68’, ‘Down with the Commies’, ‘Forty years are enough’ and ‘Perestroika, here’. A huge banner was unfurled halfway through the march bearing a saying attributed to Gorbachev in large red letters: ‘If not now, when?’ The police did nothing. They let the march go ahead.
According to the agreement with the authorities, the demonstration should have ended at the cemetery and most of the people left, particularly the older ones. It was now about 5.30 p.m., a freezing winter late afternoon and that familiar dense, foul, sulphuric fog had descended over Prague. A core of about 3,000 people, all students or young workers, stayed at the cemetery, standing around in the cold, doing nothing in particular At around 6.30 p.m. a few of them shouted ‘To Wenceslas Square’ and they turned back, hastening towards the centre of Prague. As they reached the Czech National Theatre on Národní Street, which leads to the Square, they were confronted by riot police wearing white helmets and carrying plastic shields and by anti-terrorist squads in red berets wielding heavy truncheons.
The students sat down in the street and started singing - hymns, the national anthem, old Beatles hits, ‘We Shall Overcome’. ‘We chanted “We have no weapons”. The only things we had with us were candles and flowers, which we gave to the police. They used loudhailers and shouted “Go home”, but they had blocked our path,’ said Charles University economics student Pavlina Rousova. Another squad of riot police had come up behind the students. They could not move.
They continued to sit in the freezing cold, wrapped in their coats, hugging each other to keep warm, and out of fear. They waited, singing, for around two hours, staring at the riot squad behind their shields. Occasionally one of the students would get up and try to ask an officer to release them from the trap and let them go home. They were ignored. Just after 9 p.m. a riot squad van appeared from behind the line of police. It deliberately rammed into the crowd, causing panic. The police attacked the students, beating them with truncheons as they scattered. ‘There was blood everywhere and I could hear bones cracking,’ said student Dasa Antelova, who managed to hide in a narrow alleyway and later make a getaway. ‘They selected people from the first row of the demonstration, and they beat them mercilessly. They would not let the young people go. They brought
in buses and arrested them all.’
There was no hiding any of the evidence of brutality. A British journalist, Edward Lucas, watching the riot police laying into the students, was led away by two officers. As they did so, a plain-clothes StB man knocked him, unconscious, to the ground. Philip Bye, a news cameraman from Independent Television News, was beaten up. At around 9.45 the violence stopped, almost as abruptly as it had started. Wounded and bloodied young people picked themselves up from the ground and staggered home, or to a hospital casualty unit. Five hundred and sixty-one were injured. Around 120 were carted off in police vans, where they were beaten again. One young man was left lying on the cobblestones on Národní Street appearing lifeless. He was covered with a blanket and stretchered away in an ambulance.3
This is where the Czechoslovak Revolution enters the murky, looking glass world of Kafka and Švejk, spiced with a hint of John le Carré. Rumour travelled fast in Communist capitals and it was generally believed, certainly more so than the official media. Within hours, the word was that the prone body seen lying on Národní Street was that of a mathematics student, Martin Šmíd. It was spread mainly by the dissident Charter 77 activist Peter Uhl, who daily provided information from the opposition underground to journalists from the West. Uhl had been told about the death by a woman calling herself Drahomíra Draská who claimed to be an old friend of Šmíd. Uhl immediately told Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America, which reported the death of Martin Šmíd as fact. There was public fury throughout Czechoslovakia. The regime denied that anybody had died in the ‘riot’ and the next day managed to produce two Martin Šmíds, both of them alive. One, who had been on the demonstration, appeared on nationwide TV breathing and talking. It did little good. Nobody believed the regime’s denials.
That weekend huge spontaneous demonstrations erupted in Prague on an unprecedented scale. An archway on Národní Street where many of the police beatings had taken place was turned into a shrine visited by scores of thousands of people. Someone had painted a cross on a wall nearby and passers-by lit candles. ‘The news about that death changed everything, not just for us, but for our parents’ generation,’ said Dasha Antelova. ‘They had been silent since 1968, terrified of what they could lose. But now they were as enraged as we young people were. Mothers and grandmothers joined students and ordinary workers on the rallies. It was all good-humoured, and wonderfully exciting, but determined.’ The government could think of no response, other than to arrest Peter Uhl for spreading false rumours.4
The regime was deeply split. The Martin Šmíd story is evidence. The Party’s own ‘sword and shield’ was working against its leadership. Often, conspiracy theories can be discounted, even in Central Europe under communism, where they abounded. But occasionally there really were conspiracies behind the theories. This is an example. The Czech secret service, the StB, faked the ‘death’ of Martin Šmíd in order to create a groundswell of popular anger that would remove Jakes, Prague Party boss Miroslav Štpán and other hardliners and replace them with Gorbachev-type reformers. It seems far-fetched, but evidence which established the conspiracy as genuine, rather than a plot in a spy movie, was provided later in a commission of inquiry set up by a post-Communist government.
The plan was the brainchild of General Alois Lorenc, head of the StB, and a small group of Party reformers who looked at events in Poland and Hungary and thought the only way of maintaining their own positions was to find a means of negotiating from strength with a divided opposition. At the same time, the other essential step in the operation - codenamed Wedge - was to infiltrate the dissident movements and find opposition figures willing to do a deal with reform Communists. It was convoluted, ill-judged and entirely misunderstood the Czech opposition and character, but undoubtedly it was bold. The details were worked out when the StB knew that there would be a big student demonstration on the anniversary of Opletal’s death. A key player was Lieutenant Ludvik Zifcák, a young StB officer who, under orders, had infiltrated the student opposition underground. In a classic ‘provocation’, he was one of the leaders of the main march to the National Cemetery, and when that ended in the afternoon he was one of the students shouting at the top of his voice ‘To Wenceslas Square’. He knew there would be a trap when the students arrived. He kept his head down as far as possible when the violence began. He lay on the ground and pretended to play dead. Drahomíra Draská, who subsequently disappeared, was another agent. She had orders to pass on the news to Uhl that a student had died.
It is still unclear exactly how much the Soviets knew about the plan - or which Soviets. While the riot police were beating up students in central Prague, General Lorenc was dining with the KGB’s head of station in Czechoslovakia, General Gennady Teslenko, and the deputy head of the KG B, General Viktor Grushko, who had arrived in Prague a few days earlier. They then drove together to the gloomy sludge-grey concrete and glass StB headquarters on Bartolomjská Street, not far from Wenceslas Square. But he socialised with KG B officers as a matter of course. That does not prove direct Soviet involvement. It is not the kind of operation that the men around Gorbachev would have recommended. It was far too risky and its main purpose opaque. The plotters had picked out their candidate to take over the leadership: Zdenek Mlyná, who they thought would start Prague Spring-type reforms, which they could learn to support. But Mlyná was no longer a Communist, had lived in comfortable exile in Vienna for some years, and wanted nothing to do with the plot. Seldom can a conspiracy have been so elaborate, so wrong-headed, and turned into such a spectacular failure. The Czechs did not rise up to remove the excesses of neo-Stalinism. They wanted rid of the Communists, and especially the Russians. As the ‘corpse’ Lieutenant Zifák said, he and the other conspirators had tried to save communism. Instead, they hastened its end.5
While a make-believe revolution was taking place in the minds of secret police officers, the real thing was happening on the streets of Prague and in a box-like theatre just off Wenceslas Square called the Magic Lantern. Václav Havel had been at his country house in Bohemia when the students were beaten up. He did not return to Prague until Sunday 19 November. He knew when the Berlin Wall fell that the Czech regime had only limited time left in power, but he did not know when or how it would go. It needed a push. When he arrived back in the city, already there was a group of friends, dissidents and opposition activists at his cluttered but elegant flat on the riverbank with a sweeping view towards the Castle. They were looking to him for leadership. From that moment he took command of the Velvet Revolution. He no longer seemed like a shy intellectual plagued by self-doubts, but appeared a strong and decisive man of authority. He was a formidable political tactician. To most Czechs he was still unfamiliar. ‘Havel was . . . more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict,’ said the Czech novelist Ivan Klíma, who had known Havel for years and did not always agree with him. ‘But the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude . . . In a certain atmosphere, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd’s enthusiasm . . . Within a few days Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.’6
The priority, he told his associates, was to form a unified group, one voice that could represent the opposition and, when the time came, negotiate with the regime about a peaceful transfer of power. The first task was to remove the totalitarian system, Havel maintained. They could all disagree later when a working democracy was established. Havel called Rita Klimova and asked her to translate for him at an impromptu press conference with foreign reporters. It was a shrewd move. He spoke English, but with a heavy accent, and he thought her part New York, part Central European cadences, as well as her wit, would play well to Western audiences. He was right. ‘The ideals for which I have been struggling for many years and for which I have been imprisoned are beginning to come to life as an expression of the will of the people
,’ he said. At last the Czechs were beginning to wake from their torpor.
First, they needed a headquarters. The previous day actors had declared a strike - as did students. So the playwright directed operations from a theatre. At ten that night he took up residence at the Magic Lantern. Performances of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s expressionist classic The Minotaur were cancelled while the Czechs brought down their government. By midnight they had agreed on a name, Civic Forum, and produced the first of a series of proclamations and demands. The group claimed to be a ‘spokesman on behalf of that part of the Czechoslovak public which in recent days has been profoundly shaken by the brutal massacre of peacefully demonstrating students’. At first there were four demands:• The immediate resignation of the Communist leadership responsible for crushing the Prague Spring and for the ‘normalisation’ purges, including Husák and Jakeš.
• The resignation of the ministers who were presumed to have given the orders for the attack on the students two days earlier, starting with the Prague Communist Party boss Miroslav Štpán.
• The establishment of an official and independent inquiry into the demonstrations of 17 November.
• The immediate release of all political prisoners.7
Shortly after it was published, Havel quipped only half in jest that it was time for another Russian invasion - now, he said, the men in charge at the Kremlin would be more on his side than on the regime’s.
Revolution 1989 Page 46