Never mind cliff-hanging. It was now time for Havel to move to the streets of Prague. It is Friday, 17 November 1989: the first day of the Velvet Revolution. Nobody thought of it that way, of course. A hallmark of revolutionary alterations of power is that they are always unanticipated and unplanned. Revolutions are surprises on a grand scale. Initially, no one is in charge. They never obey the rules of the putsch. Coups d’état, the Prague variety of 1948 for instance, are a type of carefully planned seizure of power. They entail elaborate preparations, usually in secret, and they are executed swiftly, often in the wee hours of the morning, when most of the population is in bed, asleep. Their effect is felt instantly: troops surround the central radio and television stations; the international airport is closed; bank accounts are frozen; new or reshuffled faces appear in the ruling group; government orders, instructions, and policies immediately reveal that things have changed, or not changed at all. Revolutions are not like this. They are not calculated in advance; and they may even be described as a long chain of unintended consequences. Revolutions consequently have no easily definable point of origin. And although they are not about trifles (as Aristotle observed) they often spring from what appear at the time to be trifles.299
No one had anticipated that sometime during that dark and dreary mid-November day late-socialism in Czechoslovakia would begin to collapse. A crowd of some 15,000 students had gathered peacefully that afternoon outside the Pathology Institute to commemorate the death of Jan Opletal, a student victim of the Nazi occupation fifty years earlier. The commemoration had the Party’s approval, and the list of speakers, both official and unofficial, had been organized by the university council of the Communist Youth Union. The students’ request to walk on to Opletal Street near Wenceslas Square, after the rally, had been refused by the authorities, so an alternative was authorized. The students were to march to the cemetery in Vyšehrad, where they would gather at the graveside of the nineteenth-century poet, K. H. Mácha. And it was agreed with the authorities that the customary candles would be lit, wreaths and flowers would be laid, the national anthem would be sung, after which the procession was to disperse quietly.
Everything but the last clause in the contract was satisfied. Instead of dispersing tamely into the evening darkness, thousands of students, feeling their spines straightening, spontaneously began to march towards Wenceslas Square. Tension rose suddenly when the students were temporarily halted by the police at the Botanical Gardens. In the distance police orders were barked. The demonstrators began to sing the national anthem. A flying wedge of helmeted police wielding truncheons cut into their ranks. Scuffles broke out. Shouting and chanting erupted. The awful sound of clumping boots was temporarily drowned by cries of ‘We are unarmed!’ (Mame prázdné ruce) and ‘No Violence!’ (Nechceme násilí). The police with truncheons now pointing at the best brains in the country seemed hellbent on breaking up the demonstration. They began by swooping on a young bearded anarchist named John Bok. They had been looking for a pretext to arrest him for some time, and Bok, a man with unusually sharp senses, knew they were cutting through the crowd specifically to arrest him. ‘Tell Vašek!... Get a message to him at Hrádeček!... Tell him what’s happening! Quickly!’ he shouted to his friends, gasping for air, as a clutch of mean-looking policemen headlocked him into arrest and dragged him, kicking back while being kicked, through the crowd and dumped him into a nearby van waiting to take him directly to prison.
Bok refused that afternoon to talk to his interrogators at Ruzyně prison. After being charged with assault of a public functionary, he was allowed one brief phone call to his wife, to whom he repeated the message that he had earlier gasped to his friends. ‘Please make sure that Vašek, who is at his cottage, gets the message to return urgently to Prague. Something has changed. He needs to be back here. Fast.’ Following those words, Bok was beaten, deprived of sleep, and tortured by pushing his body backwards over a chair, so that he couldn’t properly breathe. The uncivil police methods presaged the fate of the remaining demonstrators. After losing Bok from their ranks, they marched on defiantly towards Wenceslas Square, edging along the banks of the Vltava River. Scores of curious bystanders, like monks coming to prayer, silently joined in. So did actors and theatre staff. Friday night patrons of the Café Slavia, located riverside just near the Havels’ flat, downed their drinks and joined the throng. Outside the famous Klášterní vinárna (the Monastery Wine Bar), waiters and customers came outside on to the streets and called out to the young demonstrators, who by now had lost their fear. They were in a relaxed and cheerful mood, and repeatedly chanted out in defiant tones, ‘Join us! Join us!’ and ‘The nation’s helping itself! [Národ sobě]’
Havel, who had gone into retreat at Hrádeček with Jitka Vodňanská, happy to be off ‘the Prague merry-go-round’300, received Bok’s message. He hurried back by car to Prague, where he arrived home around midnight. He heard from his brother Ivan, and from Olga, breathtaking news. At a performance of Ivan Kurz’s The Madman’s News at Smetana Hall in Prague, the audience had cheered and applauded Václav Neumann, the director, and the members of the symphony orchestra, who had signed a petition protesting against Havel’s most recent imprisonment. Olga reported the irony that during the performance of The Madman’s News the state television and radio stations had coldly issued a ČTK communiqué which stated that the day of remembrance had been ‘hijacked by anti-social elements, well known to the police, and authors of various recent outrages’. The communiqué had denounced those who had chanted slogans hostile to the socialist state. It described them as uninterested in ‘dialogue, reform, or democratization’. They were forces of instability, violence, and social destruction. ‘Because of this,’ it concluded, ‘the forces of order were obliged to take necessary measures to restore peace and order.’301
A different, but equally exaggerated, version of the events, Havel learned, had just been broadcast by West German television. It informed viewers that reports were being received that an insurrection was taking place in Prague, that its streets were full of young people, that the police were out in force, and that Prague Castle was surrounded by tanks. Something rather different had happened, in fact. After the arrest of John Bok, the originally smallish student demonstration had safely reached the National Theatre, where its numbers had mushroomed to over 50,000 people. At that point, everybody who had been present confirmed that all public places adjoining the demonstration were packed, as if, after all the years of isolation, people could not get enough of each other’s company. The protest seemed to take on a life of its own, as if it had sprouted wings, which is perhaps why at around eight o’clock, as it snaked into Národní třida, it was suddenly greeted with walls of riot police.
Determined not to allow the marchers to reach Wenceslas Square, the commanders of the police operation ordered the leading demonstrators to disperse and simultaneously cut off their long tail of supporters with another thick wall of riot police. Suddenly the crowd realized that it had lost its escape route, and that it was surrounded. All hell broke loose. Many of the trapped and panicky demonstrators began to chant, ‘No violence! No violence!’ and ‘We are unarmed!’ Thinking that this might just be another temporary halt enforced by the police, some parts of the crowd called, ‘We’ll go home from Wenceslas Square! We’ll go home from there! [Z Václa váku domů]’ Other demonstrators, sensing correctly that they were now at the mercy of the white-helmeted riot police, taunted them with shouts of ‘Freedom! Freedom! [Svoboda]’. Still others bravely made fun of the President by calling him by his first name, and by mimicking his strange ungrammatical way of speaking, deliberately mispronouncing his name in a working-class drawl. ‘Jakeš, Jakeš...’ they called. ‘We don’t want Myloš! [Nechceme Myloše]’.
Once again came the megaphoned order to disperse. The crowd now knew that this was a sick joke, since there was nowhere to go. Many trembled, sat down, then began to sing the national anthem, followed by ‘We shall overcome’. Keys were jangled, and a handful of young women were seen giving flowers to the unsmiling police, fixing them on to their helmets and transparent shields. Hundreds of candles were lit. ‘No violence! No violence!’ the seated crowd again chanted, yellow light flickering on their faces. Some again called out, ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ The response was swift. Riot police charged from both sides into the trapped crowd. It began rising to its feet, only to be thrown violently against itself, then flung about, jumbled into confusion, and stampeded into the arcades next to the Reduta jazz club.
The crush was so great that individuals began to gasp for air. Many shrieked for help. Cameramen and photographers began to be manhandled out of the way. Then out of nowhere armoured personnel carriers, diesel engines revving, arrived on the scene. Out poured scores of grim-faced Red Berets, the feared Special Anti-Terrorist Forces, who instantly charged at the demonstrators, herding them back to the street, wielding long truncheons on men, women, and children, pushing and shoving each of them in the direction of a carefully prepared narrow path flanked on either side by riot police. The street was filled with sounds of ripping clothing. Glasses scrunched underfoot. Thudding truncheons. Heavy breathing. Screams. Confused shouts. Then shrieks of demonstrators being pushed in ones and twos through the police funnel. Each was punched, kicked or cracked over the head or shoulders. All came through the tunnel looking dazed. Some cursed. Most stumbled. Others crashed to the ground, stunned, bleeding. The lucky ones were dragged into side streets to safety by friends and helpers. The luckless lay there, kicked and struck into unconsciousness.