Bok is explaining why the term coined by the French journalist from the Parisian daily Liberation--the adjectival modifier "velvet"--is the misnomer that most Czechs think it is. East Berlin's crash-the-Wall blitz on the night of November 9 was by far the more "velvety" event. The hapless East German border guards addressed their politely queuing burghers as "Dear Citizens" before allowing them through to West Berlin.

But the farther east we surf in 1989's history--meaning, the farther outside the ken of Western media that the revolutions occurred--the more ferocious those revolution days get. In Timisoara, Romania, hundreds were massacred by the Securitate, the Romanian security police, and the dictator Nicolai Ceausescu  was lynched by a mob incensed that the police had been given carte blanche to kill.

In Prague on the afternoon of November 17, 1989, the police strategy was a bit different, namely, to send out a few hundred officers with truncheons to crack as much demonstrator skull as they possibly could. If somebody died, well, that would just be something that they'd fix.

The "official" memorial that afternoon--the memorial that became the demonstration--had been called by university students. The assembly was sanctioned by the government because the event had been billed by the organizers in honor of Jan Opletal, a student who was killed 50 years earlier, on November 17, 1939. He was killed by the Nazis as part of a student demonstration protesting the Nazis' occupation of Prague.   

The students' theory was to hold a demonstration, of which the communists could not disapprove. For their part, the Milos Jakes regime wanted to pretend that they were Gorbachev-perestroika hangers-on. Everybody knew the demonstration was about current events. The Berlin Wall had fallen eight days earlier. 

As the candlelight vigil for Opletal at the Vysehrad cemetery--where Czech cultural and political heroes such as the composers Smetana and Dvorak and the philosopher Palacky are buried--wound down, Bok nicked the meeting by sheer personal force, exhorting the people to follow him to the center of Prague in protest.

An early signatory of Charter 77, the open letter of protest in 1977 that forged what became the Czech and Slovak political opposition, Bok had already withstood a decade of persecution and jailings. He knew what he had to do.

"Basically, I just ran around yelling at the people that it was time to take the message to the government," he laughs.; But, we know what one drop of water can do as a dam is about to break. Some ten thousand people followed Bok down the hill to the center of town and straight into the maw of the police. At the Ministry of Justice, about a mile and a half south of Prague's Old Town, the police cordons split the crowd, trapping several thousand and forcing another several thousand outside the cordons to the riverside. An hour later, they were able to sneak in to remount a protest in the town center, on National Avenue (Narodni Trida), before also being crushed and carted off by the police. Hundreds were arrested at both sites. 

Bok was with the thousands caught in the first wave of arrests inside the cordons at the Ministry of Justice.

"I had been doing some things for Olga [Havlova, or Mrs. Vaclav Havel] and Vaclav at their riverside flat," Bok says, "so I got picked up around four to go to the Opletal vigil. We did the candlelight thing, then got everybody to march down the hill. Bloody hell, when they got us trapped they were swinging. One dancer coming from rehearsal across the square was taken, even though she was not one of us; I pulled her away from the cops as they were beating her on the ground. Then we were all arrested and taken away in the little cars. I was interrogated and beaten, of course, because they knew me. I remember my body turning amazing colors in the days after, blue next to brown, next to green and yellow, but, I must say, it was only the normal beating, nothing special. This would be the night of the 17th in Ruzyne prison."

Firing the Communist regime's total desperation was the realization in that moment that, no matter how many truncheon-bearing centurions they sent out, they had lost. It had all gone too far; the weight of history was against them. Because of the violence of the crackdown on the 17th and the intense international outrage it engendered, the citizens of Prague were liberated to hit the streets without fear of such reprisals. The overwhelming 500,000-strong demonstrations on Wenceslas Square that come to mind when we think of November and December 1989 in Prague took place on that little bit of free ground won by the demonstrators on November 17.   

Which is why the 17th is now a national holiday in the Czech Republic.   

Bok was sprung from detainment on the 20th and went straight to Wenceslas Square, to Vaclav Havel's ground-breaking speech before a crowd of 200,000. During the blistering two-month-long run-up to the presidential election in December, Bok was a core security tactician at Havel's side, shuttling Havel to his back-channel meetings with the Communists as they negotiated how and when the Communists would abdicate.

Thirty-nine days later, on December 29, 1989, the non-velvet revolution had succeeded: Havel was elected president. During Havel's first term, Bok served as a sort of one-man truth commission in the dirtiest possible place, the Interior Ministry, where he was responsible for filtering out Communists, garden-variety sadists, torturers, and other human-rights violators. He now runs the Salamoun Society, a watchdog NGO monitoring mistrials and other abuses of rights within the Czech justice system.

"You know one funny thing after all these years," says Bok, an infamously detail-obsessed fixer. "I can't remember what we were working on that day. Was it the furnace? Something in the kitchen?; Anyway, I regret that I never got back to the Havel's flat to finish whatever it was."

Further Reading:
* Prague Rocks: Guy Martin loves the town