The Year that Changed the World (28 page)

How brilliantly they performed! Prague was Eastern Europe's happiest revolution, a delirium of good feeling. It was also the fastest, a revolution of passionate compression. Once it got going, the communists almost ran from power. This gentle revolution, this “Velvet Revolution” as Havel dubbed it, was sheer theater, a geopolitical spectacular as masterfully choreographed as the playwright's own absurdist comedies. It unfolded in vignettes, scenes and acts, with cameo appearances by famous faces from the past. Alexander Dubcek. Joan Baez. Dissidents just released from jail. Eminent émigrés suddenly returned
home. The theme music was the Velvet Underground's “Waiting for the Man.” The stage was the Magic Lantern, the underground theater that served as Havel's headquarters. The backdrop was Prague, impossibly romantic, the city of a hundred spires, tawny ocher houses and churches, sifting late-afternoon light, moonlight on the Vltava. The cast changed constantly, an immensely colorful cavalcade of friends and oddly assorted comrades-in-arms: philosophers, academics, journalists, students, boiler stokers, engineers, ditchdiggers, drunks, poets, hangers-on, hangers-out, pretty girls, all caught up in an intoxicating swirl of revolution, excitement, passion, sex and intrigue.

The audience, of course, was the world. We watched it happen on TV. We saw the people, standing in the hundreds of thousands in Wenceslas Square. It was revolution as a street party, the climax of the story that was the Year of the Fall, a turning point in history: cliché transmuted into Truth. We knew our heroes would win. Everyone swept up by it felt young again, as though the world had suddenly, mysteriously, euphorically been made new.

This revolution was counted in days. Day One was the “massacre,” as everyone called it. Day Two was a call to arms. Martin Mejstrik and other student leaders at the theater academy of Charles University called for a general strike. By afternoon, the journalist faculty had joined them. Then the actors. Then the artists and musicians. Meeting at the Realistic Theater, not far from Charles Bridge in a neighborhood of twisting cobblestone streets and tilting medieval houses, these various groups combined forces and set a date: Monday, November 27, from noon to 2 p.m. Thus the Velvet Revolution began.

On Day Three, a Sunday, Vaclav Havel returned from his country house in northern Bohemia. He had chosen not to be in Prague the day of the Vysehrad march or the next, for fear of being arrested. In the early afternoon, a small group of dissidents met at his apartment overlooking the Vltava; the presidential palace, or Hrad, loomed in the distance. This was the time. They all knew it. They needed to create an organization, a Czech Solidarity. What to call it? A young dissident named Jan Urban—
Rambo
to his friends, in honor of his penchant for goading the police and leading them on chases across Prague's rooftops—proposed
Forum,
after the New Forum in East Germany. Havel suggested
Civic,
for the democratic civil society they
wished to create. “That was that,” Urban recalled. “Civic Forum was born.” Havel would lead it. Jan and his best friend, Ivan Gabal, my translator's husband and a founder of a group called the Circle of Independent Intelligentsia, would be among the chief organizers.

They wasted little time. They demanded the resignation of communist leaders responsible for the Soviet invasion of 1968, most prominently President Gustav Husak and the boss of the communist party, Milos Jakes. They called for an investigation into the authorities' handling of the Friday-night massacre and the resignation of the men in charge. They appealed to all Czechs to support the students' strike. Then they disappeared into the night, hiding out in friends' apartments and other secret places, waiting to see how the regime would react.

On Day Four, I arrived. Driving in from the airport late that Monday afternoon, my taxi took a circuitous route to avoid the main bridges into town. “Closed by tanks,” the driver explained. Shades of '68. But at the central Wenceslas Square, a surprise awaited. It was teeming with people, bubbling with fun and good spirits—and not a policeman in sight. Over the weekend, thousands of students had begun gathering in the Square to protest Friday night's beatings. Authorities did not intervene, and so the crowds grew. By Monday afternoon, they numbered in the tens of thousands, a mass of people already far too big for the police to easily disperse were they tempted to try. “I've never seen anything this big,” said a twenty-three-year-old art student named Renata. “We are ready to fight. We have had enough. We want to be free to speak our minds.” A well-dressed man with a briefcase told me that he had been a teenager in 1968. “I believe this is the end of the regime,” he predicted. “There will be no more violence. The police are afraid. Soon, they will start thinking about how to save themselves.” Besides, how could they resist this, he added, gesturing toward the people milling about us. There, a father with a child on his shoulders. Here, an elderly couple, he with a cane, she in a fur hat. A young woman said incredulously, “My mother is taking part. She used to say, ‘Don't get involved. Stay away from all this.' And tonight, here she is!”

This was revolution as a family outing. Exuberant crowds invented a new Czech national anthem. Anyone could play it. You just took your
house keys out of your pocket and jingled them above your head. Tens of thousands were doing it, and the noise drowned out everything, like the ring of a thousand alarm clocks. Time to wake up. Your time is up. The din was deafening. “Jakes! Jakes! Jakes!” “Freedom!” “Democracy!” “Down with the government!” A spade was planted in a trampled municipal rose garden. Attached to it was a sign:
WHO'S THIS FOR
? The answer was already obvious.

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.