Glasnost: The Velvet Revolution

Vision and Motivation
Velvet Revolution demonstrationBy the second half of the 1980s, the political atmosphere in the Soviet Union and its satellite states was more relaxed than it had been in previous decades, due to Mikhail Gorbachev's introduction of two new governmental policies: Glasnost, a government effort to make the country's governance transparent and open to debate, and Perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system. Many historians cite the introduction of these two policies as a catalyst for many of the nonviolent democratic revolutions that erupted in Soviet-bloc countries.[1]

Czechoslovakia's Communist Party took efforts to prevent Gorbachev's reforms from being enacted at home, where an autocratic

While Slovak members of the activist movement referred to the democratic transition as the Gentle Revolution, Havel and his Czech compatriots continue to refer to it as the Velvet Revolution. Some argue that Lou Reed's Velvet Underground catalyzed the adoption of velvet by Czech civic activists, after a rare copy of the band's first record was snuck into Prague in 1968. The Velvet Underground later influenced The Plastic People of the Universe, close friends of Vaclav Havel who were an underground rock band that musically embodied Czech's opposition movement from 1968 to

With the formation of the Civic Forum less than 48 hours later, most university students, theatre employees and actors went on strike instantaneously, yet Havel knew that many more would have to join them in strike in order for the movement to grow and bear fruit. Havel and his cohort agreed to continue pushing for the government to resign; however, in order to bolster national support for his movement, a new message needed to be crafted for the Czech people. Havel, who determined that methods of economic and social noncooperation in the form of strikes would be most effective against the government, sought to organize a general strike for November 27 that would span across