Thirty-three years after I stood transfixed before a photograph of Russian tanks moving into the streets of Budapest, quelling the popular uprising there with determined brutality, true revolution and an overthrow of communist government came to Czechoslovakia.
British historian and political writer Timothy Garton Ash, noting the series of revolutions cascading through Eastern Europe in 1989, reminds us that “in Poland the transition [from communism to democracy] lasted ten years, in Hungary ten months, and in Czechoslovakia ten days”. Those ten event-filled days between November 17th and 27th, known to Czechs as the “Velvet Revolution” and to Slovaks as the ”Gentle Revolution”, were in fact a remarkable, non-violent resistance whose effects reverberated throughout the world and still are celebrated today. (more…)
