Starting three decades ago this Sunday, people in Czechoslovakia threw off communism with remarkable speed in the heady days of 1989. The Velvet Revolution soon swept out one of the most rigid of Soviet Bloc regimes, in place since the crushing of the Prague Spring two decades earlier. But thirty years on, the euphoria and seeming certainties that came with the ensuing integration into the European Union and NATO are gone. The former student activist leader Vaclav Bartuska joins Susan and Greg to look back at the birth of a free society in Czechoslovakia and discuss the Velvet Revolution’s significance today.
The Cable is a production of ICWA and the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group.
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Guest
Ambassador-at-Large for Energy Security, Czech Republic
Student leader in the Velvet Revolution, 1989
Hosts
Executive Director, Institute of Current World Affairs
Journalist, author of Russians: The People Behind the Power
Director, Transatlantic Democracy Working Group
Senior fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States
The Cable is produced by Rebecca Picard
Lead image credit: Josef Šrámek ml.,
