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Thirty Years Ago In Prague, Student Protests Snowballed Into The Velvet Revolution

In 1989, just eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a student protest against communist rule was violently put down in Prague, the Czechoslovak capital. The crackdown on November 17 only strengthened the protest movement and, within days, hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets.

By the end of the month, the Communist Party agreed to hold free elections. In December 1989, dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was elected president by the country's Federal Assembly, marking the beginning of a new democratic era.

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