On November 21, 1989, the crowds that had begun gathering in Prague after a police crackdown on students four days earlier swelled into the hundreds of thousands, filling Wenceslas Square in defiance of the Communist regime. Actor and dissident Vaclav Havel addressed the throng from a balcony, and the demonstrations, entirely peaceful, made clear that four decades of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia were entering their final days.
The spark had come on November 17, when riot police beat back a student march in central Prague, injuring hundreds. Rather than silencing dissent, the crackdown ignited it. By November 20 crowds were already swelling, and on November 21 an estimated 200,000 people crowded into Wenceslas Square, chanting slogans and ringing keys in a symbolic gesture meaning it was time for the old guard to leave.
Vaclav Havel, the playwright who had spent years in and out of Communist prisons, emerged as the movement's improbable leader, speaking from the balcony of the Melantrich building overlooking the square alongside Alexander Dubcek, the reformist leader crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968. Their appearance together linked two generations of Czechoslovak resistance.
Within days the entire Communist Politburo resigned, and by December 29 Havel himself was president, an almost unthinkable turn for a man banned from working as anything but a stagehand a year earlier. The Velvet Revolution's defining feature, its near-total absence of violence, made November 21's massive but orderly gathering a template studied by democratic movements ever since.