Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1969 Dubček was replaced by hardliner Gustáv Husák and exiled to the Slovak
forestry department. Thousands of people were expelled from the party and lost their
jobs. Many left the country, while others were relegated to being manual labourers
and street cleaners. The two decades of stagnation until 1989 are known today as the
period of 'normalisation'.
In economic terms, Prague has prospered since the Velvet Revolution,
becoming one of the biggest tourist draws on the continent. Unemploy-
ment is minimal, shops are full and the facades that were crumbling 20
years ago have been given facelifts.
VELVET REVOLUTION & VELVET DIVORCE
The year 1989 was a momentous one throughout Eastern Europe as communist gov-
ernments fell like dominoes in Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria and Ro-
mania. But the revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia was perhaps
the greatest of them all. It remains the gold standard around the world for peaceful an-
tigovernment protest.
Ironically, the Velvet Revolution actually had its start in a paroxysm of violence on
the night of 17 November, when Czech riot police began attacking a group of peaceful
student demonstrators. The protesters had organised an officially sanctioned demon-
stration in memory of students executed by the Nazis in 1939, but the marchers had
always intended to make this demo a protest against the communist regime. What
they didn't count on was the fierce resistance of the police, who confronted the crowd
of about 50,000 on Prague's Národní třída and beat and arrested hundreds of protest-
ers.
President Masaryk remains a beloved figure in Czech history and is re-
garded as the father of the country. But historians question his legacy, par-
ticularly pushing for the creation of independent, weak states in central
Europe that left a power vacuum for the Germans and the Russians.
Czechs were electrified by this wanton police violence, and the following days saw
nonstop demonstrations by students, artists, and finally most of the population, peak-
ing at a rally on Prague's Letná hill that drew some 750,000 people. Leading dissid-
ents, with Havel at the forefront, formed an anticommunist coalition, which negoti-
