The "Velvet Revolution" (Czech: sametová revoluce, Slovak: nežná revolúcia) (November 16 - December 29 1989) refers to a bloodless revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the communist government there.

It started on November 16 1989 with a peaceful student demonstration in Bratislava. One day later, on November 17, 1989, another peaceful student demonstration in Prague was severely beaten back by the communist riot police. That event sparked a set of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December, and a general two-hour strike of the population on November 27. By November 20 the number of peaceful protestors assembled in Prague swelled from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million.

With other communist regimes falling all around it, and with growing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 they would give up their monopoly on political power. Barbed wire was removed from the border with West Germany and Austria on December 5. On December 10, the Communist President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament on December 28 and Václav Havel the President of Czechoslovakia on December 29 1989.

As one of the results of the Velvet revolution, the first democratic elections since 1946 held in June 1990, brought the first completely non-communist government to Czechoslovakia in over forty years.

The term

The term Velvet Revolution was invented by a journalist after the events, caught on in world media and eventually in Czechoslovakia itself. Media, riding on infotainment wave, saw this success and started tradition of inventing and assigning a poetic name to similar events - see color revolution.

See Also

• Velvet Divorce (peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia few years later)
• Civic Forum and Public Against Violence (political movements that played major role in the revolution)