| 22.11.200910:32 (GMT) | Eight days after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, students sparked the revolution in Prague, The Independent recalls. They were allowed to hold a rally marking the 50th anniversary of the death of a young student who had been killed by the Nazis after the Germans had occupied Czechoslovakia. After the main procession around 3,000 students went to central Prague where they were immediately confronted by riot police and all but one of the exits to the square were blocked, the paper expands. Without any warning, the police charged into them; around 500 students were injured and 120 arrested. One young man was left lying, appearing lifeless, and taken away by ambulance. One of rumours circulating around Prague was that the prone body was a mathematics student, Martin Smid. The dissident activist Peter Uhl passed on the news to Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Reuters. Soon it was reported as fact.
The following evening, and every night for the next 10 days, huge demonstrations of up to 400,000 people filled Wenceslas Square.
Without a doubt the Smid story was the catalyst, the paper marks. But there was a big lie at the heart of the story. In Czechoslovakia there really was a conspiracy behind the theory in 1989. The plot was hatched by General Alois Lorenc, then 53, and a small group of reformers near the top of the party. The top Kremlin leadership did not know and would have disapproved. it But elements within the KGB certainly knew. A key player was Zifcak, then 24, a police spy within the dissident movement for three years. After the main demonstration that afternoon, he was the first to make an impassioned call for the rest to follow him to Wenceslas Square. He knew there would be a trap there, found a place to keep his head down during the mêlée, and spotted the right time to lie down and play dead. There was also a female secret agent, with orders to tell dissident Uhl about Smid's "death". General Lorenc who was jailed for four years once said that he and his co-conspirators had tried to save Communism, but instead hastened its end, the paper marks. | |
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