Sighet Memorial: Room 82 - Prague Spring (1968) - Charta 77 (1977) - The Velvet Revolution (1989)

In Czechoslovakia the communists took over the power on 25 February 1948. The same year, democrat leaders Eduard Beneš and Thomas Masaryk were arrested. The dissatisfaction engendered by ideological hypocrisy and economic stagnation increased gradually and erupted three decades later, in 1968, as a result of the experiment of “socialism with a human face”. The liberalisation of the “Prague Spring” resulted in a reform movement throughout Czechoslovak society, articulated in “The Two-Thousand-Word Manifesto” launched by a group of intellectuals led by Ludvik Vaculik. The emancipation seemed so dangerous to Kremlin – and its acolytes in Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Bulgaria – that on the night of 20-21 June 1968 Warsaw Pact troops – not including troops from Romania, to the country’s credit – invaded Czechoslovakia, claiming to liberate it. Thus died the hopes of millions of people who believed that communism could be reformed and that communist ideology was compatible with freedom. Later, the Soviets imposed on the leaders of the “Prague Spring” a gradual surrender and the stationing of Soviet troops for an indefinite period. Expulsions from the Party and sackings followed, censorship and terror returned, and the Czechoslovak society sank into deep despair and apathy during the so-called “normalisation process”. The suicide of student Jan Palach, followed by other suicides in protest, was a symbol of long-term latent resistance. A lot of associations, movements, literary circles, surreptitious universities, jazz clubs were set up, as a means of standing up for human rights and harassing the stagnant communist regime led by Gustav Husák. The most important group of protesters was “Charta 77”, which functioned clandestinely from January 1977 to November 1989, when the “Velvet Revolution” was victorious, making Václav Havel the head of state.