As Central Europe's communist governments cracked one after another in autumn 1989, Czechoslovak citizens grew bolder in their public demands for change. Student and dissident networks, long suppressed, organized gatherings that swelled through November, setting the stage for the massive protests of November 17 that historians mark as the true start of the Velvet Revolution.
By mid-November 1989, the Berlin Wall had already fallen and Hungary had opened its borders, and Czechoslovaks watched their neighbors shed communist rule while their own government, led by hardliners, insisted nothing would change. The contrast was intolerable to a population that included some of the most sophisticated dissident intellectuals in the Eastern Bloc, including the playwright Vaclav Havel, who had already spent years in and out of prison for his activism.
The gatherings in these days were smaller precursors to what would explode on November 17, when riot police beat student protesters on Národní Street in Prague, an act of brutality that backfired spectacularly by galvanizing the entire population.
Within ten days, communist officials would resign en masse. Within six weeks, Havel—a man who had been imprisoned as a subversive—would be elected president by the same parliament that had once condemned him. The revolution was so swift and comparatively peaceful that Czechs named it for velvet.