The Curtain Rises: Eastern Europe, 1989 : CHAPTER 9 CZECHOSLOVAKIA : A Brutal ‘Mistake’ Sparks a Rebellion : The Prague Spring was crushed, but the dream didn’t die. And when student marchers are beaten, it rekindles the flame.

Nov. 13 was damp and misty in Prague, already dark at 5 p.m. The city was quiet, but an expectation seemed to weight down the echoing, shadowed streets of the Old Town. Anticipation was in the air, like an ionic disturbance or falling barometric pressure.

In how many dissidents’ apartments over the last two days had the conversation, speculation, analysis turned over the question-- when?

Leaning over their coffee cups, under the haze of cigarette smoke, in rooms with heavy, worn furniture and walls of books and framed photos of secret meetings in the mountains with Polish dissidents, they talked into the night. When?

Jan Urban’s apartment was in the oldest part of the city, at the foot of the 1,000 stone steps leading up the hill to Hradchany Castle, the seat of the Czechoslovak government. Urban, 46, sat now at his dining table under a cone of light from an overhanging lamp. He was a teacher and one of the leaders of a group called Obroda, composed largely of former Communists who had been expelled from the party in the purges that followed the 1968 Soviet-led invasion.

Urban had just been on the phone to Bratislava, where a dissident had been on trial. The defendant, once a Central Committee member of the Slovak Communist Party, had been charged with subversive activities for proposing a memorial to those killed in the invasion. The judge had thrown the case out of court. It was a sign, perhaps. Definitely, the government was nervous--first Erich Honecker, then Todor Zhivkov.

To Urban and other opposition figures, the demise of the East German and the Bulgarian leaders demonstrated the arrival of two new principles in the Communist world. The Honecker case showed that a Communist leader unable or unwilling to control disorder was in deep trouble. The Zhivkov matter showed that in a fight between reformers and conservatives, Moscow’s vote went to the reformers.

The portents, for the Czechoslovak leadership, had to be obvious. Never had the government been so isolated and so vulnerable. “The situation is wonderful,” Urban said, “and absolutely unpredictable.” The question was, how would it happen, and when?

“I think it must come from the streets,” Urban said on Nov. 13. “People are not yet in the streets, and that is worrisome. But the demand is there, the market is there, the situation is now so ready that we have to be willing to go to jail in numbers of 200 or 2,000. So I think it is question of a very short time before someone takes the risk to open the space, to provoke the authorities to make a mistake.”

The mistake was only four days in coming. On Friday, Nov. 17, a demonstration was organized by the Charles University Union of Student Youth, a Communist-sanctioned group, to commemorate the death of a student at the hands of Nazi occupiers during World War II. The authorities, after much debate, had approved the observances, and late in the afternoon, about 7,000 students gathered at the university. One of the speakers was a representative of the youth union. As he got up to speak, he was jeered and whistled. A banner, hoisted aloft in the crowd, said, “We Want Freedom for Christmas.” But the crowd was good-natured, even jovial.

As the evening sky darkened, they marched off toward the cemetery where the martyr, Jan Opletal, is buried. There, with an air of solemnity, they lit candles. They sang the national anthem. And the mood shifted.

The students, now perhaps 15,000 strong, headed toward the center of Prague, Wenceslas Square. A line of riot police blocked the way. For an hour it was a standoff, until the students turned up the main thoroughfare of Narodni Street and were met by another line of police. The students were hemmed in, front and back, with only a narrow alley for escape.

Then the police charged. Batons flailed, cracking against heads and upraised arms. Boots thudded into the backs and stomachs of those who fell. Police dogs jumped into the melee. The dazed and wounded crawled from the street. Blood poured from cut faces and heads. The police pursued those who ran, trapping them in doorways and alleys, methodically clubbing anyone they could reach.

The next morning, Jan Urban was careful to avoid the arrest that often came at times when the authorities were nervous. He went to the attic of his building, climbed onto the roof and crossed over adjoining buildings to join his friends. “We knew immediately,” he said, “this could be the moment of change.” The authorities had crossed the line.

For years it had seemed as though the Czechoslovak public had bought into the unwritten bargain offered by the Communists. The trauma of 1968, the spectacle of Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague and Bratislava and Brno, stamping out the “Prague Spring” reforms of Alexander Dubcek, lingered heavily.

The architects of that movement, to create what Dubcek called “socialism with a human face,” were thrown out of their jobs and out of the party. The politically suspect were given employment reading meters or stoking furnaces in apartment buildings. Dubcek himself went to work in a Bratislava post office. The public kept its mouth shut, by and large, and the government did its best to provide the anesthetic.

While the Poles lived with perpetual shortages and Hungarians complained of inflation, Czechoslovak shops were full of meat and cheese, sold at stable prices. Nearly everyone had a car, a Soviet-made Lada or a Czechoslovak-made Skoda, knocked off work by noon Friday and drove to their cabins in the country.

The dissidents were mild, reasonable intellectuals. Stocky, blond-haired playwright Vaclav Havel in 1977 helped to compose the appeal for human rights that became known as Charter 77, whose signatories simply pressed the Czechoslovak government to uphold the provisions of its own constitution--which it signally failed to do. By the end of his latest jail term in May, Havel, 54, had spent a total of nearly five years in prison for his activities. Scores of others had also served time in prison for similar offenses against the government, all of them peaceful protests for human rights.

But those who had watched the Czechoslovak situation closely over the last two or three years, including the dissidents, were unsure if the opposition movement had made any headway with the public. The evidence was mixed. More young people, especially students, seemed interested. Still, the usual demonstrations over the last year had drawn the usual crowds--10,000, perhaps, at the biggest--but nothing distinctly larger than before. Some said the opposition was too intellectual, too removed, to reach ordinary people.

By nightfall on Saturday, Nov. 18, those questions still had not been answered. About 1,500 students marched on Wenceslas Square, lighting candles for a student who had been rumored--falsely, it turned out--to have been beaten to death by police. That same day, however, brought grim news to the Communists, whose chief ideologist had returned from Moscow with instructions that the party was to re-evaluate the events of 1968.

For two decades, the official view of 1968 had sustained the Communists, who cleansed the party of its liberal heretics. For those who had taken over--Gustav Husak, now president of the country; Milos Jakes, Husak’s successor as party leader, and all those who climbed upward with them--the news from Moscow amounted to Mikhail Gorbachev’s kiss goodby. They were on their own.

The next day, a Sunday, nearly 100,000 people surged into Wenceslas Square. Havel, Urban and other dissidents met to plan a strategy for dealing with the government. On Monday morning, Havel announced the formation of the opposition group Civic Forum, with demands for the resignations of Jakes and eight top party bosses, the release of political prisoners and an investigation of police violence. Civic Forum called for a two-hour general strike for a week later.

That afternoon, 200,000 packed the square, and again the next day. The authorities this time allowed the use of a public address system, and Havel, dissident priest Vaclav Maly and some of Czechoslovakia’s best-known actors and artists spoke to the crowd from a balcony over the square. The crowd jangled key rings (“The bell tolls for you!” they chanted in a taunt at the Communists) and shouted for Jakes to resign.

Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec met representatives of Civic Forum for the first time Nov. 21. Little of substance came out of the meeting, beyond Adamec’s promise that force would not again be used against demonstrators. But the government, after four days of protest, had been brought to the bargaining table.

The authorities still had not capitulated. On Tuesday night, Jakes sent the party’s civilian guard, the 20,000 loyal members of the People’s Militia, to move into factories in Prague in an effort to counter the activities of students urging workers to join the movement. Party leaders also expected the militia to finally consolidate control of state television, whose coverage of events veered wildly depending on which faction was in charge at the studios. For a while, party insiders said, Jakes was told the militia had been successful. It had not. Its members had been shouted down and driven out of the factories. The mood of rebellion spread; the old lines of authority broke down. The militia retreated.

On Wednesday, Nov. 22, Jakes met with the Soviet ambassador to Prague. That day, and the next, crowds estimated at 250,000 filled Wenceslas Square. There were crowds of 60,000 and 20,000 reported in Bratislava and Brno.

On Nov. 24, Alexander Dubcek returned to Prague.

As evening swiftly gathered, Wenceslas Square for the fifth straight day was full. The crowd itself, day by day, had become a phenomenon. It chanted, as if rehearsed, complicated slogans. It parted willingly to make way for first-aid vehicles. Residents of Prague, a city not famous for the sweetness of its manners, could not stop talking about how polite people were being to each other. Havel called it the “Gentle Revolution.” The crowd had its own discipline, its sense of humor (“We Want a Government With a Higher IQ,” one banner read). And, as it amounted in size to nearly a third of Prague’s population, it contained every age group in the city.

On the day Dubcek came, a striking number in the crowd were his contemporaries, men and women in their 60s. Walking through that crowd, hushed and waiting with its Czechoslovak flags waving in the dusk, made the hair stand on end. Forty years of Communist attempts to fill this square for May Days and other socialist holidays had never come close to this.

As Dubcek spoke, the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was in emergency session. Two hours later, Dubcek, Havel and other Civic Forum leaders were holding their evening news conference in the Magic Lantern Theater off Wenceslas Square.

Dubcek, tall and thin, his once-dark hair now almost colorless, was delighted with his return to the spotlight. In 20 years of near-silence, he had remained a hero in his country and remained where he was, committed to an interrupted experiment while another generation grew up. When he said he remained a committed socialist, a kind of weird silence fell over the crowd. “I believe in the reformability of socialism,” he said. “We must look truth in the eyes and depart from everything that is wrong.”

Havel looked pained as Dubcek spoke.

“For me,” Havel said, “socialism is a word that has lost its meaning in our country. It has been only a sham word the bureaucrats used to justify their existance. I identify socialism with men like Mr. Jakes. I believe in social justice, and I think the only thing that can guarantee social justice is a free economy, to reintroduce the market mechanism.”

As the two men spoke, perhaps unintentionally illuminating the passage of time and ideology, news arrived from the meeting of the Central Committee. Havel’s brother, Ivan, hurried onto the stage with a whispered message. The announcement followed.

Milos Jakes was out. The Politburo had resigned.

Shouts broke out. Havel, Dubcek, everyone on the stage, embraced. Jan Urban came on from the wings carrying a bottle of champagne and glasses. Havel gave the toast:

“Long live a free Czechoslovakia.”

Outside, a gentle and silent snow fell. Small crowds, gathering before store windows to watch the television news, looked on transfixed, hushed and amazed, mostly at themselves. At the top of the great square, in a shrine-like stillness, the statue of St. Wenceslas was ringed by flickering candles. Then the crowds streamed in, filling the square, and a polka band began to play.