remained obedient to Ceausˇescu’s dictatorship.
But the Czech communist leadership felt ill at
ease and began to make a number of concessions.
Thereafter the collapse of communist rule was
both sudden and unexpected. On 17 November
1989 there was a large student demonstration in
Prague joined by thousands of people. The bru-
tality of the police attempts to suppress it, which
caused many injuries, provoked increasingly large
mass protests. Meanwhile, under Havel’s leader-
ship, opposition groups, with Charter 77 mem-
bers at their core, began to organise themselves
as the Civic Forum opposition. Their aim was
the overthrow of the communist regime. An
emotional open-air meeting was addressed by
Alexander Dubcˇek in Prague. In the end the
workers’ decision to join a national strike brought
down the government. Jakesˇ resigned with his
ministers. The Velvet Revolution was completed
without violence only a month later when Havel
on 29 December 1989 was elected president.
High on the agenda for Havel and the govern-
ment elected in June 1990 was how to deal
humanely with the problems of creating an effi-
cient market economy, and with the nationality
problem that had beset the state from its birth,
the relationship between Slovaks and Czechs. The
Czech Republic should have found it easier to
shrug off communism and embrace a market
economy: unlike its neighbours it had enjoyed
democratic rule before the Second World War.
The Czechs had also the capacity for innovative
industrial skills. However, the rapid privatisation
programme, which sought to bring about a wide
distribution of shares in state industries, ran into
difficulties here just as it did elsewhere in ex-
communist Europe. The shares were bought up
by investment trusts which in turn were run by
the banks, many of them state owned. This meant
that the liberalised economy lacked many of the
disciplines and benefits of the market. Despite a
financial crisis, the ruling coalition of conservative
Prime Minister Václav Klaus struggled on until he
was ousted in November 1997; the economy
resumed its slow rate of growth.
Slovakia was particularly hard hit since most of
the heavy industry was located there. Separate
reformist parties, the Civic Forum and the Slovak
Public Against Violence, gained a clear majority
in the multi-party federal election held in June
- The Communist Party survived with a
large decline in support. The dominant issue in
1991 became whether the country would split.
Slovakia, which had most to fear from a rapid
move to a market economy, turned to a new
leader Vladimír Mecˇiar, who founded a national-
ist party. By the close of 1992, a bloodless separ-
ation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia had
been agreed.
Slovakia’s flawed democracy was treated with
suspicion by the West. From 1993 to 1998 pop-
ulist Prime Minister Mecˇiar had dominated
Slovak politics as leader of the Movement for
Democratic Slovakia. An opposition began to
coalesce, the Slovak Democratic Coalition, and
ousted Mecˇiar after the September 1998 election.
During the next four years the Western-orientated
conservative–centre coalition, pro free market and
democratic, made it its aim to join NATO and the
European Union. The economy began to improve,
but the strength of Mecˇiar opposition – his party
was still the strongest single party in parliament –
held out the prospect that he would return to
power. His weakness was that no other party
would join him in a coalition. His star was fading.
The candidate put up by the Slovak Democratic
Coalition, Robert Schuster, beat Mecˇiar in the
presidential election in 1999.
Romania’s revolution of 1989 was both the
bloodiest and the most enigmatic in its outcome.
Two communist leaders dominated Romania’s
post-war history, Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej from
1945 to his death in 1965, and his successor
Nicolae Ceaus ̧escu from 1965 until his ignomin-
ious end, shot with his wife beside him against a
wall. The savagery of the Romanian revolution
was a reaction to the harshly repressive rule of
his closing years. Both Gheorghiu-Dej and
Ceaus ̧escu were driven by a ruthless nationalism
to make Romania independent of the Soviet
Union, and to make it strong. They followed the
classic Stalinist route of emphasis on the crash
development of heavy industry and, under
Ceaus ̧escu, this was done without any regard to
the cost of the people’s standard of living.
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