The Wages of Freedom

From The Boston Globe

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in Eastern Europe, a reporter who was on the ground weighs the fallout.

Presidential candidate Vaclav Havel waves to his supporters from a balcony in Prague in December 1989.REUTERS

On a chilly November evening in the fall of 1989, I stood on a busy street in Prague and wondered if spring would return.

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1968, the “Prague Spring” had brought students and workers into the streets to protest communism and pressure the government into enacting reforms including freer speech and government transparency — only to see their revolt crushed by Soviet tanks.

Now, clutching a notebook and pen, I stood with other foreign correspondents waiting to see if the Czechs, emboldened by the rebellions of their communist neighbors — the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and upheaval in Hungary — would take to the streets again.

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