“It was the early hours of the morning when an ever-so-slightly inebriated Havel finally set off for home, and we followed him, to a nondescript apartment block, and managed to record the only interview with him. His wife Olga tried to shoo us away, saying he was too exhausted to speak to the TV, but he insisted – this was a moment too euphoric, too long fought for, to waste on sleep.”
Not the Prague Spring – but the Prague Autumn.
Weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was in the Czech capital with Channel 4 News as the people poured on to the streets to reclaim their own freedom.
It was sparked by the violent suppression of a student protest by the authorities, but in the country where the last attempt at democracy was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks, there was no violent uprising in response. What became known as the Velvet Revolution was a movement led by intellectuals, by the writers and artists who’d been repressed for years – now finally regaining their voice.
Packed into Wenceslas Square, tens of thousands of people jumped wildly in the air. We called them the “bouncing Czechs”. They jangled bunches of keys, a triumphant sound of sibilant bells, as the hero of the sixties, Aleksandr Dubcek, threw his arms into a wide embrace, hugging the air in a gesture of triumph.
And there was a smaller, almost shabby-looking figure, there on the stage: Vaclav Havel, playwright, poet and human rights activist, author of the dissident manifesto known as Charter 77.
He’d been jailed several times for his activism, banned from the theatre, kept under constant surveillance, and forced to work in a succession of manual jobs. But now here he was: founding a new movement which was called the Civic Forum, which managed to bring together all the pro-democracy groups and overthrow the Communists from power.
And we were there as it happened: inside the meeting of the Czech Communist Party as its General Secretary, Milos Jakes, finally called it a day and resigned; hurtling through the streets of Prague in a hastily comandeered Skoda, following Havel and his crowd as they were greeted with wild cheers in the National Theatre, the headquarters of the Civic Forum; we were there in that packed room as a thousand hands reached out in celebration, as Vaclav Havel declared that the people had won.
It was the headiest of times, and I was so caught up in the moment that I somehow managed to translate a cable from Lech Walesa congratulating the Czech dissidents on their victory. I’d never spoken a word of Polish before and haven’t since.
But the night was not over. It was the early hours of the morning when an ever-so-slightly inebriated Havel finally set off for home, and we followed him, to a nondescript apartment block, and managed to record the only interview with him. His wife Olga tried to shoo us away, saying he was too exhausted to speak to the TV, but he insisted – this was a moment too euphoric, too long fought for, to waste on sleep.
The fact that this group of intellectuals managed to overthrow an entrenched Communist regime without a single shot fired, without so much as a stone thrown in anger, is testament to their commitment to democracy and the purity of their beliefs.
The ugly brutality witnessed in Romania, just days later, revealed a frightening alternative: there was none of that in Prague. Havel was named President of the Republic before the end of the year – while free elections held in 1990 gave his government the popular legitimacy it needed.
From the Berlin wall to the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc – this was a time that truly changed the world. And Vaclav Havel was truly one of its heroes.
Read more: The extraordinary life of Vaclav Havel.
Felicity Spector