The dissidents who spent decades working for change in Czechoslovakia were well aware of the potential for revolutions to go wrong, for the very people who cried out loudest against tyranny and oppression to become tyrants themselves. Their own history taught them that lesson. Czech Communists had been among the most determined opponents of the Nazi occupiers during World War II and had suffered cruelly for their resistance. Many of these same people, however, would come to play instrumental roles in the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the transition from Nazi to Soviet domination was marked by violence, both against the Germans and their collaborators and between Czech groups jockeying for power in the emerging postwar state.

The challenge, then, for Václav Havel and his fellow dissidents was how to produce radical change without repeating the mistakes of the past. At the heart of their solution was the rejection of a simplistic division of their society into oppressors and oppressed. They would not treat tyranny as an alien presence, as something that would disappear when a handful of evil individuals were forced from their positions of power. Instead, they would treat it as an affliction affecting their entire society, one that required the efforts of all members of society, dissident and communist alike, to cure. The documents included in this activity offer an opportunity to explore the efforts of Czechoslovak dissidents to produce a peaceful revolution. As you examine them, think about how the lessons of the past shaped the authors’ vision of the future. How did they lay the groundwork for a strong, unified society even as they worked to overturn the existing social and political order?