Two dates define modern Prague, and the second is unintelligible without the first. Both are marked on the ground and both are within a short walk of the centre.
Before: the coup and the 1950s
Czechoslovakia was not liberated into communism — it voted for it, up to a point. The Communist Party won 38 per cent in a free election in 1946, the largest share of any party, and took power completely in a coup in February 1948.
The 1950s that followed were among the harshest in the bloc. Show trials, including of the party’s own leadership — Rudolf Slánský, the general secretary, was hanged in 1952 along with ten others after a trial with an explicit antisemitic character. Political prisoners were sent to uranium mines. The largest statue of Stalin in the world went up on Letná in 1955.
1968: the Prague Spring
Alexander Dubček became first secretary in January 1968 and began a programme of reform: press censorship abolished, freedom of movement, rehabilitation of political prisoners, and an economy loosened. The phrase was “socialism with a human face”.
For eight months Czechoslovakia had something close to a free press and a genuine public argument, inside a one-party state, and the population responded with an enthusiasm that alarmed Moscow.
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, around half a million Warsaw Pact troops entered the country. The Czechoslovak army was ordered not to resist. What happened instead was mass civil disobedience — street signs removed to confuse the troops, radio stations broadcasting from hiding places, crowds arguing with tank crews in Russian, and the young men on the tanks discovering that they had been told they were suppressing a counter-revolution and had not been.
Around 137 people were killed.
Jan Palach, a 20-year-old student, set himself on fire at the top of Wenceslas Square on 16 January 1969 — not in protest at the invasion itself but at the apathy and resignation that had followed it. He died three days later. Jan Zajíc did the same a month later.
Normalisation
The twenty years that followed are the part visitors know least and Czechs remember most.
Dubček was removed, half a million people were expelled from the party, and anybody who had supported the reforms was barred from professional work. Academics became window cleaners and stokers. Public life became a set of rituals everybody performed and nobody believed, which Havel described in The Power of the Powerless through the parable of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window because not putting it there would be noticed.
Charter 77, a document signed by a few hundred people in 1977 asking the state to observe its own laws, was met with arrests and harassment. Its signatories included Havel, who spent nearly five years in prison.
1989: eleven days
17 November. A student march commemorating a 1939 protest against the Nazis was attacked by riot police on Národní třída. A rumour that a student had been killed — untrue, but widely believed — turned it into a general movement.
19 November. Civic Forum was founded in the Magic Lantern theatre.
24–25 November. Around 750,000 people on Letná. Dubček appeared in public for the first time in twenty years, alongside Havel.
27 November. A two-hour general strike across the country.
29 November. The constitutional article guaranteeing the party’s leading role was abolished.
29 December. Havel — a playwright who had been in prison earlier that year — was elected president.
No one was killed. Hence the Velvet Revolution, and the term stuck.
The country divided peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993 — the Velvet Divorce, which polls suggest most people in neither country wanted and which happened anyway.
Where to see it
Národní třída — a small memorial of bronze hands in the arcade at number 16, where the students were beaten. There are candles on 17 November every year.
Wenceslas Square — the memorial to Palach and Zajíc, a bronze cross set into the pavement below the museum.
Letná — the plain where the crowds gathered, and the metronome standing on Stalin’s plinth.
The Museum of Communism for the period in general, with the 1989 footage.
The National Monument on Vítkov in Žižkov, whose twentieth-century history museum is the best account of all of it.
Olšany Cemetery, where Palach is buried — his grave was exhumed and moved by the authorities in 1974 to stop it becoming a shrine, and returned in 1990.