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Velvet Revolution

In 1989, before the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion, the Slovak members of the Movement for Civil Freedoms (HOS) decided to commemorate the event by laying flowers as the locations of those in Slovakia who had been killed. Five of the organizers signed the letter announcing it. They were promptly arrested and came to be known as the 'Bratislava Five'.

On November 14, 1989, the final day of the trial of the 'Bratislava Five', a crowd gathered in front of the Bratislava Justice Palace. As Miroslav Kusý recollects,

Dubček accompanied him, and the gathered mass of people began to spontaneously calling to him to say something. They lifted him onto their shoulders and he spoke from there, talking about political rights and freedoms, thus on a subject related to the process". As Kusý said, it was "actually the first political speech at a public manifestation, marking the very beginning of the revolutionary changes in Slovakia in November 1989".

On 17 November, Dubček attended the students' march at Albertov, in the Prague 2 municipal district. Fearing he would give a speech, the StB arrested Dubček, releasing him the next morning. This was said to mark the last arrest of an opposition leader. Martin Bútora, one of the founders of Public Against Violence (VPN) recounted Dubček's appearance at Slovak National Uprising Square on 23 November as,

Alexander Dubček descending directly from heaven,... from non-existence... because the man had not existed for twenty years, being pushed into the background not only as a politician, but also as a human-being”, but now a VPN leader, as a remover of a curse, liberation from fear. "We wanted to show to the party leadership...that they met with a united opposition... We just needed to give a clear enough signal of at what expense a violent intervention would be made.

On November 19, the Civic Forum, headed by Charter 77 member Václav Havel, was established to oppose the communist government. Several hundred thousand individuals demonstrated against the communist government in Prague on November 20–28, 1989.

The night after his appearance at Slovak National Uprising Square, on 24 November, Dubček appeared with Havel on a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square, where he was greeted with tremendous applause from the throngs of protesters below and embraced as a symbol of democratic freedom. Several onlookers even chanted, " Dubček na hrad ! " ("Dubček to the Castle "—i.e., Dubček for President). The crowd was divided by his calling this new revolution a chance to continue the work he had started 20 years earlier and prune out what was wrong with communism. By this time, most of the protesters wanted nothing to do with communism of any sort. Later that night, Dubček was on stage with Havel at the Laterna Magika theatre, the headquarters of Civic Forum, when the entire leadership of the Communist Party resigned. This resignation in effect ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

While the show of a united front was necessary for the revolution of 1989, it would later prove a political embarrassment for some who vied for power against later regime opponents. They dismissed Dubček as a symbol of the past rather than the future. This reflected a division between the youth movements (sometimes called the Jacobins) that wanted nothing to do with the past and the older generation that was seen by them as too lenient and accommodating. Many of these arguments are obscured by politics.

The political rivalry between Husák and Dubček, which also was said to have features of personal animosity stemming from Husák's conviction that Dubček was personally to blame for the Warsaw Pact invasion, continued to have repercussions even after the fall of the regime in November 1989. By appointing the Slovak Marián Čalfa as prime minister of the federal government the day before his abdication from the office of president of the republic, which took place on December 10, 1989, some charge that Husák deliberately pre-empted Dubček by indirectly enabling the election of Václav Havel for the office of Czechoslovak president. Dubček's popularity throughout Czechoslovakia was high, giving him a very good chance of winning direct election for president. However, he lacked support from the prominent figures in the November revolution. They supported Charter 77 member Havel and a new generation of leaders.

When Dubček himself was asked to explain this division, he said that the younger generation were unable to distinguish between his generation of reformist communists and the generation of communists who came before. He saw the consequence of this, post-Velvet Revolution, as creating a weakened democratic front against the narrow-minded and dogmatic. Dubček said this was not the first nor the last time in history when, "any revolution reaches a certain stage, it starts devouring its own children." According to a member of Charter 77, Petruška Šustrová, the younger generation had not forgotten that it was Dubček who signed the 'baton law' and his fellow reformers who assisted in pacification of the country. She explains that a culture of trust had been lost. It was, "politically and economically impossible to continue where we had left off in 1968; the times had changed, and so had the people".

While Havel became president, on December 28, 1989, Dubček was elected chairman of the Federal Assembly, holding this position until the parliamentary elections in June 1992. True to his past dedication to Eurocommunism, prior to this on December 16, he welcomed the delegation of the Italian Socialist Party headed by its chairman Bettino Craxi in Prague. He also met Luciano Antonetti, as a journalist and an old friend. Antonetti interviewed Dubček for the newspaper l'Unita on the eve of the presidential election. In the interview Dubček said, "This time with the European left, I am thinking of the next spring." But he emphasized that "I will remain outside the Communist Party, even if it is renewed". Throughout 1990–92, Dubček continued "intensive contacts" with Italian communists and socialists, including visits to Italy where he was awarded honorary citizenship in many Italian cities.

In 1990, Dubček gave the commencement address to the College of Arts and Sciences at the American University School of International Service in the United States. He called Czechoslovakia's fight against the Soviet invasion a "moral victory". Gorbachev would have agreed, when he said, “We thought that we had strangled the Prague Spring while in reality we had strangled ourselves.”

In 1992, after long serving as an independent, he became leader of the Social Democratic Party of Slovakia and represented that party in the Federal Assembly. At that time, Dubček ambiguously supported the federal union between Czechs and Slovaks against the ultimately successful push towards an independent Slovak state. However, once it was clear that an independent Slovak Republic had become inevitable, at the same time historically as the breakup of Yugoslavia and other events, many assumed Dubček would become its first president.

Its work completed, the Charter 77 Movement disbanded on November 3, 1992, four days before Dubček died of injuries from a car crash. The Federal Assembly voted for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on November 25, 1992. Czechoslovakia was formally dissolved on December 31, 1992; With that, Slovakia became an independent republic.