Prague's velvet and steel, 20 years later

Tony Wesolowsky

is a journalist and writer in Prague

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Down the street from our apartment in Prague is where the Czechoslovak "Velvet Revolution" got its spark 20 years ago.

Students had gathered Nov. 17 at Charles University to mark the killing of one of their own by the Nazis decades ago.

Events were not taking place in a vacuum, however. Tectonic shifts were under way across Eastern Europe. East Germans were fleeing in the thousands to the West. The Solidarity trade union under Lech Walesa was taking power in Poland. Hungary was dismantling its one-party system. The ultimate blow was the crumbling of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9.

The Czech students had that event in mind as they marched to the center of town, where they were met by a phalanx of grim-faced police in riot gear. It is common lore that the overthrow of communism in Czechoslovakia went smoothly, peacefully, hence the "Velvet" tag. But that day, police were at their brutal best, attacking with batons protesters who approached them with flowers.

The crackdown was a catalyst. Angered by the police action and sensing the regime was on its last leg, Czechs took to the streets in massive protests, jingling keys for change. Less than two weeks later, the communist system was unraveling, and Vaclav Havel, a playwright, political prisoner, and Lou Reed fan, would soon become the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.

Today, a supermarket sits on the corner where the students were bludgeoned during those fateful days in 1989. Capitalism is firmly entrenched here. The cobblestoned streets of Prague are lined with restaurants, pubs, and upscale boutiques. With its architectural heritage given a needed scrubbing after decades of communist neglect, Prague has become a top target of the camera-clicking crowd. The city's roads are clogged with more and more upscale cars, pushing out the old, boxy Skodas, the Czech autos.

The ills of capitalism are here to see as well. The number of homeless is growing. City officials scratch their heads trying to figure out how to shuffle them out of the sight of tourists, the lifeblood for much of the economy.

"Nightclubs" that hardly hide the prostitution going on inside can be found on the backstreets off the famed Wenceslaus Square, site of massive anticommunist protests. Those looking for cheap booze and sex have made Prague a top destination, leading one English paper to call it one of Europe's sleaziest cities.

And like elsewhere in the region, the countryside has harvested fewer fruits of the free market than the cities. Traveling to our country home in the winter is like being in Pittsburgh during the days of the smokestack industries. The air has a grittiness as homes burn coal, wood, and whatever else is flammable, including tires. All are cheaper than gas. Stocking up wood for the winter is an obsession and necessity for some.

With all the free market's warts, few here or elsewhere in the former Eastern Bloc want to trash it and return to the past, despite the sense of security it did offer along with the cruelty and limitations.

I asked a friend who lives in Chribska, site of our rustic retreat, whether the credit crunch had shaken his faith in the free market. Pepa had just had his hours cut back at a thread factory in a small town near the northern border with Germany. He looked at me as if I were kidding, before answering with a heaping dose of sarcasm, "Oh, sure we could go back to the way things were, when the shops were full, and we all drove Trabants," the tiny clunker once churned out in bunches in East Germany.

The Trabants are gone, as are the Soviet troops. The Czech Republic and other former Warsaw Pact nations are now members of what was the enemy, NATO. Membership in the now not-so-exclusive European Union means the Czechs and other Eastern Europeans are out of Moscow's orbit, although the Kremlin is still reluctant to see it that way.

That partly explains why Moscow stomped its feet over U.S. missile-shield plans to deploy 10 missiles in Poland and build a radar in the Czech Republic, ironically on the site of a former Soviet military site.

Vox populi in both Poland and the Czech Republic showed little support for the plan. However, the leadership in Warsaw and Prague believed it would further anchor them in the Atlantic alliance.

When Barack Obama announced that those two components of missile defense would be scrapped, political leaders and thinkers here felt betrayed, and fear that the U.S. president is caving to the Russian bear as Washington looks to "reset" relations with Moscow.

A former foreign minister, Jiri Dienstbier, told me such thinking was nothing more than scaremongering.

But for most Czechs, the history is hard to forget.