Go out to the square

The events on Chistoprudny Boulevard on 5 December reminded me of Prague in November 1989. Leaving alone the “historical context” (different times, different countries, different people, different customs), I will simply tell you how the revolution began 22 years ago, albeit a “velvet” one. And in this sense, the Russian fool-authority on Chistoprudny has taken a confident and wide step towards "its own", home-grown revolution (it is unlikely to be "velvet"). Our government last Monday did not step on the traditional rake. Our government (that's why it's a fool) has stepped into a minefield: when and where it will explode next time, one can only guess.

…So, how did it all start in Prague? Looking ahead, I will say - very similar.

November 17, International Students' Day, student rally in Prague's Albertov district, banners over their heads: "We demand academic freedom", "Down with the monopoly of one party!" After the rally, students (up to 10,000 people) tried to break through to Prague Castle and present a petition to the President of the Republic, Gustav Husak. The bridges across the Vltava were blocked by the fighters of the National Security Corps. The special forces cut off the head of the column, drove it to the narrow National Avenue, blocked it from both sides and started beating people (batons in their hands, legs in berets). No one died, but in terms of the impact on the psyche, this is comparable to the bombing - the diagnosis of specialists.

The next day, along the entire National Avenue (in terms of length, this, of course, is not Leninsky Avenue in Moscow, but still) candles were burning, hundreds of candles - in memory of the victims of the "dispersion" (a term born in the bowels of the agitprop of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) of a student demonstration November 17th. In response to the violence, theaters and universities went on strike, and the authorities, no longer relying on police officers frightened by someone else's blood, brought parts of the People's Militia into the city, numbering 20,000 people. The "iron fist" of the Communist Party was preparing to strike at the audiences where students spent the day and night, at the theaters in which the intelligentsia rallied. And here’s another thing I remember: a very small, forty people, group of people on Wenceslas Square, surrounded by a much larger crowd of onlookers ... Someone’s voice: “Join, don’t be afraid, they won’t do anything to us if we go to the square and if there are many of us ... ”Then I went to the center of Prague as if to work (in fact, this was my job - I then served as a TASS correspondent).

The next day, at the foot of the monument to St. Wenceslas, there were about two hundred people, the next day - already twenty thousand. And then the area grew by tens of thousands. When Vaclav Havel addressed the protesters for the first time already as the leader of the united opposition, a knowledgeable person told me that there were at least three hundred thousand on Wenceslas Square and the streets adjacent to it. In Prague, by this time, word of mouth was working flawlessly (there was no Internet then, and television was no different from ours today) - information was transmitted orally and quickly.

From the strongest impressions of those days: I saw how fear left people, they parted with it painfully, remembering water cannons, armored personnel carriers and clubs. Fear came out with pain, like a child from the mother's womb, like stones from the kidneys. But even after unbearable pain, in addition to devastation, you feel that you are still alive, that you are still a person. "We are people!" chanted the demonstrators on Wenceslas Square.

The final chord: 750 thousand on the Letensky field (Wenceslas Square would not have accommodated such a number of people). Television is broadcasting live (journalists finally refused to carry out the criminal orders of their superiors, because it became clear on whose side the power is). The invariable moderator of all revolutionary rallies, priest Vaclav Maly, declares a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the communist regime, and it seems as if someone turned off the sound of a huge TV - such silence ensued. Only a giant banner flaps in the wind: “The revolution from below – we don’t have our own Gorbachevs – has won!” On December 10 at 13.00 CET at Prague Castle, Gustav Husak took the oath of the new government and resigned from the post of head of state. And on New Year's Eve, Vaclav Havel became president of the republic. Someone calculated: it took him and his comrades 10 thousand minutes (November 17 - December 10) to win.

... Of course, history, especially someone else's, does not teach us anything, but it has its own logic.