The Velvet Revolution ends forty years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia

NOV 17 1989 · 12:00

Video: The Night Czechoslovakia Broke Free — The Velvet Revolution Date: 1989-11-17 · Type: dissident · Hub: prague · Tags: prague, revolution, czechoslovakia, 1989, havel, civil-society, parallel-polis From typed samizdat to the balcony of the Magic Lantern in six weeks. November 17 1989: riot police beat student demonstrators on Národní třída, sparking the cascade. By November 19, the Civic Forum had formed — led by Havel, drawing directly on the Charter 77 cadre and its decade of parallel-institution building. By November 24, Alexander Dubček and Havel were addressing crowds of 300,000 in Letná park. On December 10, Gustáv Husák swore in the first non-Communist-dominated government since 1948 and resigned. On December 29, Havel was elected president by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. The speed — six weeks from the first beaten students to a new republic — was the result of the parallel polis having done its work. Charter 77, VONS, the samizdat networks, the underground seminars: these had maintained a functioning civic infrastructure throughout the Normalization period, so that when the regime's coercive capacity collapsed, the organizational substrate for self-governance already existed. The Velvet Revolution is the payoff event for the pre-history strand of this archive, and its lessons are contradictory. On one hand, it vindicates Benda's thesis: parallel institutions outlasted the state they shadowed. On the other hand, Havel entered the Castle and the Civic Forum became a political party and the parallel structures were absorbed into the official polis, which is precisely what Benda's essay had warned against. The Czech cryptoanarchist tradition that would produce Paralelní Polis in 2014 remembered both halves of that lesson: the revolution succeeded, and the revolution institutionalized itself. The people at Dělnická 43 were, in this reading, the ones who declined to go to the Castle. It is worth noting that the Velvet Revolution happened in the same autumn as the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9), which is in the same decade as Chaum's DigiCash (1989) and two years before the Cypherpunks Mailing List (1992). The pre-history of this archive is a single connected decade. Facts • November 17 1989: student demonstration on Národní třída violently dispersed by riot police • Civic Forum founded November 19, drawing on Charter 77 leadership • Alexander Dubček appeared on Wenceslas Square balcony November 24 • Gustáv Husák resigned December 10; Havel elected president December 29 • Václav Klaus, later Havel's rival and eventual successor, became Finance Minister in the transitional government