The Year that Changed the World (29 page)

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.

On Day Eleven, Havel and his ascendant revolutionaries held a massive rally at the soccer stadium in Letna Park, in the hills above the city where a giant statue of Stalin once stood. Perhaps half a million people braved the cold and congealing winds, snapping flags and banners like whips. It might have looked like the usual gathering: people cheering, Havel and others exhorting. But it was not. Behind the scenes, the revolution entered a new phase. What began as a spontaneous outpouring of support had by then evolved into calculated political theater of the highest order.

That was evident in the meticulous stage management of the event. As thousands of people converged in streams upon Letna, student marshals directed them to their proper places. Sixty rock musicians had been working since early morning to set up an elaborate sound system. There were nursing stations and public-assistance booths. “A child is lost,” an announcer declared over the loudspeakers, and the multitudes stopped what they were doing until the kid was found.

Havel stepped forward, speaking from the spot at the stadium where Jakes and other communist party bosses usually stood to watch their annual May Day parades. “If anyone had told me a year ago that I would see this, I would have laughed,” he said, to guffaws from the crowds.
Of course, a year ago he was in prison. With that, he turned the microphone over to none other than Ladislav Adamec.

What was Havel doing, giving this forum to a member of the ruling communists, one of
them
? Behind the scenes, Adamec had asked for Civic Forum's support. He calculated that with the opposition behind him, he could persuade the Central Committee to appoint him general secretary, a man acceptable to both camps who could unify the country and take Czechoslovakia down the path to reform. Havel was pretending to go along, an aide whispered as we watched this final act in the drama unfold only a few meters away. He at best considered Adamec to be a man of the minute, rather than the hour. By giving him his chance, Havel calculated that he could destroy the communists' last best hope.

And he was right. Adamec blew it, spectacularly. At Havel's behest, the crowds welcomed him. “Adamec! Adamec!” But then he opened his mouth. The first word out, incredibly, was “Comrades!” He called for discipline, an end to the strikes, economic rather than political change. Pausing for what he expected would be cheers, he realized he was undone. “No,” the crowds shouted back, amid a mounting chorus of jeers and boos. Adamec struggled manfully to continue, all but drowned out by angry shouts: “Resign! Resign!” It was like watching a man being drawn and quartered. Weirdly, a spade materialized from somewhere in the crowd and was passed forward, shaken aloft by every passing hand.

So came the end, “gently, gently.” Havel called for a moment of silence for those “fallen in the fight for freedom.” Snow began to filter down, lightly at first and then more thickly. A horse-drawn cart left the park, decked out with banners and the wings of angels, and the people began to follow. One by one, the half million at Letna joined hands and in single file began to walk toward Wenceslas Square, more than a mile and a half away, scarcely saying a word in the gently falling snow.

For me, this was the moment. To this day, I can hardly remember it without tears. The rickety old cart with its angel wings, the bells on the horses. The people following, always hand in hand. It was so gentle, so strong and irresistible. Of course I followed, too. The procession slowly wound its way through the paths and woodlands of the park,
now covered in white. It snaked down the medieval streets behind the castle and then into the square in front of the darkened presidential palace. There were no chants, no cheers, no hints of confrontation. Just the unbroken line of people passing silently in the white darkness, the line looping back and forth upon itself outside the forbidding gates. The snow muffled their footfalls. There was no sound but their soft shuffling, broken only now and again by a gentle shaking of keys.