When was velvet revolution

Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. This one, though, is very much official - a bronze statue of Ivan Stepanovich Konev, the Soviet general whose forces liberated much of the country from the Nazis. But Konev was not, as the original communist-era plaque claimed, the "saviour of Prague".

The decision has provoked fury from the Communist Party, the Russian embassy and far-right groups. Konev and his soldiers didn't arrive in the city until 9 May He was accompanied by the notorious Smersh Soviet counter-intelligence, which swiftly set about abducting Russian emigres and whisking them off to the gulag prison camps.

Konev also oversaw the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. Years of bickering over the wording of the plaque descended during the summer into scuffles. A tarpaulin protecting it, ostensibly from red paint, was repeatedly torn down. Ondrej Kolar, who was five in , has received so much abuse over the plan he briefly needed police protection. Prague is a city of ghosts, and at these three sites the past is never far away.

Days of non-violent protests culminated in the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. Letna Plain. Tomas Tulinger's T-shirt recalls the hero of the Velvet Revolution - but Vaclav Havel's values are no longer universally appreciated.

Image source, Getty Images. Vaclav Havel addressed a massive audience on Letna Plain on 25 November , at the climax of the Prague protests.

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Burlington, VT: Ashgate, Transitions Online November 16, Oslzly, Petr. Paulson, Joshua. Miller and Hardy Merriman. Taylor, Cory, director. Los Angeles: Agora Productions, Shephard, Robin H.