Twenty-one years after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia’s communist regime fell — and almost no one was killed. The Velvet Revolution of November–December 1989 began with a student demonstration on November 17, ended with the election of the playwright Václav Havel as president on December 29, and was named for the almost entirely non-violent smoothness of the transition.
The November 17 demonstration was meant to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi closure of Czech universities in 1939 and the death of student Jan Opletal. The march was officially permitted, and roughly 15,000 students gathered in Prague. When the column reached Národní třída, riot police beat the marchers with truncheons and used tear gas. The assault — captured on film and broadcast widely that evening — destroyed the regime’s last claim to legitimacy.
The response was enormous. By November 20, more than 200,000 people were on Letná Plain in Prague; by November 25, the same number had reassembled at Letná with their counterparts in Bratislava. The Civic Forum, a loose coalition that Havel and other dissidents had founded in the preceding days, became the political vehicle. Protesters rang keys (a quiet gesture of unlocking doors), lit candles, and sang. There was almost no violence; the security forces stood down.
The regime collapsed in stages. The entire Presidium of the Communist Party resigned on November 24. The federal parliament stripped articles 4 and 6 of the constitution — the leading role of the party — on November 29. A new government under Marián Čalfa took office on December 10, with a non-communist majority. On December 29, the federal parliament elected Havel as president by 261 votes to none, with 7 abstentions.
Havel, a playwright whose plays had been banned under normalization, and who had spent four years in prison in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was a near-perfect symbol. The Velvet Revolution, and the parallel but separate “Gentle Revolution” in Slovakia, ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia. They also closed a political arc that ran directly back to 1968: the reforms of the Prague Spring were, twenty-one years late, finally implemented. For the longer arc from Prague Spring to Velvet Revolution, see the article.