The focal point of the commemorations was Národní Avenue in central Prague, where 35 years ago, a demonstration initiated by students resulted in clashes with communist police and mass arrests.
Originally, the government-approved demonstration was expected to gather a crowd of some 5,000 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of Jan Opletal, a student of Prague’s Charles University. Opletal was shot protesting the German occupation of his country and the closure of Czech educational institutions in late October 1939 and died of his wounds several weeks later.
On the day of the demonstration, the crowd swelled to 50,000 protestors, disgruntled with the communist rule and the Soviet domination of their country, the most violent expression of which was the
1968 invasion of Soviet-led forces of the Warsaw Pact in response to Czechoslovakia’s attempt to reform its socialist system against the wishes of the Kremlin.
More than 560 people were injured in the clashes with the police, prompting students to go on strike. The students were soon joined by actors and other intellectual and cultural elites.
The events of November 17 were the bloodiest in what was effectively a bloodless revolution, earning it its name: the Velvet Revolution.
The following weeks saw more demonstrations with increasing numbers of protestors reaching 800,000 on November 25 and a general two-hour strike two days later. Throughout those weeks, the communist party’s grip on power crumbled, as it itself recognized its untenable position.
By the end of December 1989, Václav Havel, a dissident anti-communist writer and playwright, was elected as Czechoslovakia’s first democratic president since the German occupation of the country in the late 1930s. He also served as the country’s last president before it peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on December 31, 1992. In parallel to the relatively peaceful nature of the transition from communism to democracy, Czechoslovakia’s dissolution was dubbed the Velvet Divorce.
Apart from the thousands of regular citizens, the commemorations were attended by president Petr Pavel, prime minister Petr Fiala, foreign minister Jan Lipavský, Prague mayor Bohuslav Svoboda, and Andrej Babiš, leader of the opposition ANO party.
Also present was deputy prime minister and minister of the interior Vít Rakušan, who in a speech said that freedom entails the right to criticize and heckle politicians, and that Czechs must continue to fight for that freedom.
In his speech, prime minister Fiala reminded those in attendance that freedom “is not for free”.
