Prague, Albertov

university campus · Albertov 2039/9, Univerzita Karlova V Praze, 128 00 Prague-Prague 2, Czech Republic

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No Violence

Available in: English | Česky

As a nineteen year old student of medical faculty, Lukáš Pollert was one of the participants of demonstration and successive procession that started on November 17, 1989 in Prague Albertov. “I and my friend made the banner and we were thinking for a really long time what we should write there. Finally we wrote: ‛No Violence.’ Even nowadays our banner can be seen in many photos from the demonstration and it became relatively medially known.” The latter Olympic winner suspected, from previous demonstrations, that this one is about to be special. He remembers he and his friends did not want to go Vyšehrad, but they wanted to go straight to the centre of Prague. Holding the banner in their hands they tried to redirect the procession. “I wanted to go to Národní Street or to the Wenceslas Square because it was a useless delay to go to Vyšehrad.” By coincidence the media later published that some provocateurs in the procession wanted to go another way than it had been set up. “It was me; I did not want to go to Vyšehrad and wanted to face the regime straight out because there were so many people that it would have been a shame to lose them on the way. We were really tired, but we had to go through it.”

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17th November 1989

On November 17, 1989 the then official and independent student organizations called together a demonstration of university students to Prague Albertov. The officially allowed event developed into the biggest spontaneous protest against the communist regime. After the end of the permitted part of the programme, thousands of people set out to Wenceslas Square. In Národní Street the procession was stopped and then encircled by police hoplites. The demonstration was brutally broken up which resulted in tens of slightly and seriously injured. The next day a hoax spread out among people saying that one of the students, Martin Šmíd, died. The situation caught fire. The very Saturday the university students and Prague theatre actors went on strike and announced a two-hour general strike for November 27. The next day in the Drama Club, the students, artists and representative dissents established a Civic Forum and claimed it a speaker of the Czechoslovak public. Every day the Prague Wenceslas Square was filled by tens of thousands demonstrators, the protests spread out to the whole country. The paralysed communist power and its security apparatus were not able to face such massive protests. On Friday 24th November the leaders of Communist party resigned and on Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th the largest demonstrations took part on Letenská pláň. The most of public joined the general strike on November 27. The non-violent overthrow of Communism, known as Velvet Revolution, was complete on December 29, 1989 when an informal leader of dissent, Václav Havel, was elected the Czechoslovak president.

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Prague, Albertov

Available in: English | Česky

The Faculty of Science, located at Albertov in Prague, was established in 1920 as the fifth faculty of Charles University; the campus also currently houses the First Faculty of Medicine. On November 17, 1939, a student manifestation took place at Albertov; this manifestation later served as the pretext for closing down Czech universities during the Second World War. Fifty years later, on November 17, 1989, 15 thousand people gathered at the very same place to demonstrate again. The originally commemorative event that was intended to honor the memory of the students who were executed in 1939 turned into a political demonstration. After several speeches, the gathered people set out from Albertov to Vyšehrad and to the center of Prague, where they were met by the police.

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No Violence

17th November 1989