Prague — before and after the freedom wave

Twenty-nine years later, in 2018, I encountered Prague’s free-market make-over while traveling with my sons. It was stunning.

I stumbled upon this communist-era relic while in Prague last year — a Trabi.

With little food on grocery shelves in 1989 Prague, I found this Absintherie in 2018 Prague remarkable.

Photos by Melissa Walsh.

By Melissa Walsh
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While a wave of revolution swept Eastern Europe 30 years ago, I was completing my degree in International Studies in Sarajevo and Vienna. During that time, I also traveled to Krakow and Warsaw, Poland, and to Prague, Czechoslovakia, participating in short-term study programs.

This month, November 2019, as I’m compiling a memoir about my years abroad during the late 1980s, I’m consumed with nostalgia from my three visits to Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic. The first was while in transit to Poland by train in March 2019. The next was five days in Prague in April 1989. And the most recent was in July 2018, when I spent three days in Prague with two of my sons.

But why is this month special? In addition to marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9), this month commemorates 30 years of democracy in the former Czechoslovakia (which in 1993 became the Czech Republic and Slovakia). Czechoslovakia had been a communist country since 1948. A series of reforms in the 1960s and a period of strikingly liberal revisions in 1968, known as Prague Spring, which included rolling back censorship, prompted the August 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops from Warsaw Pact countries. A tight Eastern-bloc hold on Czechoslovakia remained for two decades.

Czechoslovakia’s November 1989 Velvet, or Gentle, Revolution, began on November 17 with a student demonstration honoring International Students’ Day — a commemoration of the 1939 student demonstration against the Nazis, during which 1,200 Czech students were sent to concentration camps and nine were executed. The demonstration spawned additional anti-government protests over the next ten days, including a wide-reaching, nation-wide general strike on November 27.

On November 28, 1989, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced the end of the party’s monopoly of power. Days later, the constitution was revised and the borders opened.
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On December 29, 1989, well-known playwright and political dissident Václav Havel became President of Czechoslovakia.

The first two times I was in Czechoslovakia, in 1989, Havel was in prison.

In his memoir To the Castle and Back, Václav Havel called the 1989 revolution, described in the video below, “a drama in several acts.”

Havel had been active in advocating for liberal reform that led to the Prague Spring in 1968. With the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia the following August, his passport was seized and his plays were banned. Havel continued advocating for human rights, resulting in several arrests and a four-year imprisonment (1979-1983). By this time, Havel was recognized domestically and abroad as an important political dissident and crusader for human rights, earning him the Erasmus Prize in 1986.

Havel was sentenced to nine months in prison on February 21, after being accused and convicted of organizing a January 1989 anti-Communist demonstration, during which Charter 77 dissident activists laid flowers at the memorial of Jan Palach — the young man who burned himself alive in January 1969 in protest to the 1968 Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was released early from prison on May 17, 1989.

In late March 1989, I was on a train from Vienna to Krakow, passing through Czechoslovakia. I remember my luggage being searched by police. Everyone’s was. The police also removed the ceiling panels in the train compartment and searched there. They searched everywhere. It was a tense experience.​

I also remember chatting with two Czechoslovakian guys about my age. I was 21.

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