By late autumn of 1989, the Berlin Wall had already fallen, the border between Hungary and Austria had become porous and Poland had long since held largely free elections.
But in Czechoslovakia, the communist government was still doing what it could to maintain a firm grip on the reins of power.
It wasn’t to last.
On Nov. 17, thousands of students took to the streets of Prague.
The march was a peaceful one -nevertheless brutally suppressed by hundreds of police dressed in riot gear.
Two days later, the crowds ballooned , on Nov. 20, fully 500,000 Czechs and Slovaks joined a peaceful march through the capital.
The Velvet Revolution , so named because it ‘s non violent nature, saw two weeks of non-violent demonstrations which eventually brought down the communist regime.
At first, nobody noticed anything special.
In January 1989, it was still business was much as usual in the Soviet half of Europe, until the populace faced persecution by the secret police in November because the general public did not openly support dissidents for fear of dismissal from work or school.
Writers or filmmakers at this time could have their books or films banned for a “negative attitude towards the socialist regime” and blacklisting included children of former entrepreneurs or non-Communist politicians which was easy to enforce, as all schools, media and businesses belonged to the state and under direct supervision.
Czechoslovakia itself had been formed at the end of World War I, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Communist Party seized power on 25 February 1948 and nationalization of virtually all private enterprises followed and no official opposition parties operated thereafter.
Polish communism went first, next Hungary’s rulers published an abdication plan.
In August, the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union began to demand independence.
In November, Erich Honecker of East Germany was overthrown, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall was breached and the next day, a palace coup in Bulgaria brought down Todor Zhivkov, the party leader and at the end of the month the Czechoslovak communist regime surrendered to the people.
In December , Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania was chased from office and shot.
By the end of 1989, the whole Soviet Europe had collapsed, with a thoroughness and suddenness never seen in history before.
Albania and Yugoslavia in the following year, with the Baltic nations, Ukraine and the countries of the southern Caucasus regaining their independence three years later,with the exception of Romania, where fighting broke out in Bucharest , these revolutions were mainly without bloodshed.
Everyone knew that “communism was in trouble”, with dire economic prospects.
The cold war was steadily unfreezing, one east-west arms-control treaty followed another, and this thaw was turning into a broadening, unpredictable flood.
Unexpectantly, the people stepped in, Solidarity won all but one of the openly contested seats -in those reserved seats, only two of all the communist candidates had reached less than 50 percent of the vote needed to qualify which meant voters had worked out how to destroy them.
After 45 years, Polish communism had been annihilated and negotiations opened to form the first non-communist government in Soviet Europe.
The next mass uprising began in October where outsiders least expected defiance: East Germany as the dauntless action of millions of ordinary people, day after day broke the regime and brought the Berlin Wall down.
That same month, the Hungarian government knocked a hole in the old Iron Curtain which by September when the border controls were lifted, 60,000 East Germans were in Hungary waiting to pour through to the west.
Riots broke out in East Germany, as crowds tried to board trains heading for the frontier.
Gorbachev arrived in East Berlin for the republic’s 40th anniversary.
Ecstatic crowds yelled: “Gorbi! Gorbi!” as he told the leader Erich Honecker that “life punishes those who delay”.
Honecker pretended not to hear either the yells or advice as Leipzig marches, defying the police, were now attracting hundreds of thousands.
Honecker threatened to copy the Chinese, who had shot hundreds of demonstrators on Tiananmen Square only months earlier which resulted in a real turning point and the armed militias in Leipzig refused to fire on the crowds and let them stick flowers in their lapels.
Horrified by this , Honecker’s colleagues threw him out of office, but it was too late.
In early November, a Berlin demonstration drew half a million to thunder calls for change.
The regime was breaking and in a whirl of incoherent reform promises, new party leaders seemed to be offering free passage through the Berlin border.
Perhaps this was not what they meant, but when they heard the news, on the November 9th , 50,000 East Berliners rushed to the Wall.
The guards had no instructions and let them pour through.
Czechoslovakia, for most of that year, stayed quiet , but now Czechs and Slovaks were listening to what was going on in Poland and Hungary and there were “illegal” demonstrations in Prague and Bratislava, but the police treated this defiance with mildly.
What happened next was completely unexpected: 17 November was the day on which students traditionally marched through Prague to commemorate Jan Opletal, a student leader killed by the Nazis.
The authorities seemed to have licensed this demonstration, but – in contrast to their behaviour in the autumn – the police suddenly rushed at the marching students and began to batter them with clubs.
The word went round that one of the students had been killed.
Much later, this was found to be untrue and the rumour seems to have been launched by the police themselves.
But the students now occupied their universities and larger, angrier crowds began to gather in the streets.
The Velvet Revolution which followed, carried forward by the spontaneous rage and hope of hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women, was a true mass uprising.
Those who took part, Czechs and foreigners, felt, to quote the historian Tony Judt, there, “the intoxicating feeling that history was being made by the hour”.
The people took over the city.
A week later, the communist leadership resigned.
Vaclav Havel and a few Charter friends commandeered a theater, invented a new movement called Civic Forum and started to debate where this revolution should go.
Within a few more days, they found that they were turning into a revolutionary leadership, then a provisional government.
November 25th, the moment, a quarter of a million people gathered to hear Havel and Alexander Dubcek speak.
In an unforgettable gesture, the crowd began to jingle their keys, telling the regime: “Your time is up.”
The was the protest of the Jingling Keys
The practice had a double meaning—it symbolised the unlocking of doors and was the demonstrators’ way of telling the Communists, “Goodbye, it’s time to go home”.
There was a brief round-table negotiation and the Czechoslovak government collapsed.
A new government composed mostly of Charter intellectuals was appointed.
The crowds by now were chanting: “Havel to the Castle!” (ie “for president”), and after first treating the idea as a joke, he accepted.
After becoming president on December 29th, he freed 16,000 political prisoners on New Years day in 1990 and abolished the political police on the next day.
Things happened fast in Prague.
All the same, there is something very odd about the events of November, Communist reformers, according to this theory, may have ordered the police attack in order to provoke mass protest.
This would force the party’s hardliners to resign and give way to a reformist leadership. But proof of this conspiracy theory is only circumstantial.
Even if it were true, the explosion which followed blew away hardliners and communist “liberalisers” together.
The Velvet Revolution, like the East German one, showed how the temperature within a police state can start to rise silently, approaching boiling point before the authorities are aware of it.
This was supremely true in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, the most brutal of all these systems.
The dictatorship was astounded when popular protests broke out in December 1989 in Timisoara, after an attempt to arrest a Hungarian pastor.
The police opened fire and there was a massacre.
President Ceausescu then ordered a huge loyalty rally for himself in Bucharest.
The rally began, but it took time for him to realize that the crowd was booing and calling him a dictator.
When the same thing happened next day, Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, panicked, escaping in a helicopter from the roof of the party headquarters.
An enormous demonstration against his rule in Bucharest was fired on by the security police, but the army unexpectedly changed sides and helped revolutionaries to capture the television station.
Hundreds died in savage, confused street fighting.
The Ceausescus were captured as they tried to flee the country.
On Christmas Day 1989, a camera filmed as they were put up against a wall and shot for “genocide”.
A “National Salvation Front” took power when the fighting died down.
Its head, Ion Iliescu was an ex-communist politician with influence in the security forces, who made only superficial changes to the system he took over.
It became clear to many young Romanians that when they had supposed themselves to be fighting for liberty they had merely been risking their lives in a murky power struggle between two communist factions.
The Soviet Union did not try to stop the inevitable and in October 1990, a million people gathered in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the formal reunification of Germany.
A younger generation was around, the new governments were a motley mixture of old and new rebels.
What most ordinary people wanted, at the end of 1989, seemed to be something like social democracy.
In other words, freedom, a regulated market economy, and a strong welfare state – the “European” model.
Not unreasonably, the public thought that they could combine the freedom and prosperity of capitalism with the social benefits they had learned to expect under communism.
They were wrong.
Price controls were abolished, subsidies cancelled, currencies were left to find their own level.
Many state industries and services were privatised, often bought over by western multinationals.
Huge gaps appeared between rich and poor: a new, predatory super-rich class on one hand, near-destitution for pensioners and the redundant on the other.
Many social services withered or vanished,and transition soon carried away the revolutionaries themselves
In Poland, a new tribe of “professional” politicians, including reformed communists, had replaced the Solidarity veterans by 1993.
Even Lech Walesa, the first freely elected president, was out of office by 1995, replaced by an ex-communist.
Czechoslovakia broke into two states in 1993.
The shape of politics had changed.
The poor – the losers in the shift to capitalism – were now championed by right-wing nationalists, not socialists.
Against them stood the new urban middle class and the sanitised post-communists, committed to neoliberal economics and European integration.
The old revolutionaries now retreated into academia, journalism or seats in the European Parliament.
.Adam Szostkiewicz, who had been jailed as a Solidarity organiser, remembers how his hopeful fellow prisoners were disillusioned by the new Poland.
“They expected a revised version of an open, free people’s democracy, which was not to be.
The new Polish democracy was too liberal and not ‘social’ enough … for me, with my middle-class background,
Miklos Haraszti, the best-known figure in the Hungarian opposition , now lives in Vienna as representative on freedom of the media for OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe).
He insists that he and his generation never had “perfect society” illusions.
“I wrote a sober forecast then, saying we knew our democracy would be noisy, dirty, corrupted.”
His main regret is that Hungarian politics after 1989 became so partisan.
“Our round table led to an idea of perfect liberal-democrat constitutionalism -almost too advanced.
Reality pushed that over.
We didn’t want majoritarian, British-style politics, but something based on consensus, on a common denominator of our democracy.
But populist instincts pushed towards a majoritarian style.
This lack of the common denominator, the partisanship especially in the media, is creating something like the Weimar Republic and that inevitably leads to totalitarianism unless we can find a substitute.