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 There are more and more academic conferences, books and articles (including my own) about the Cold War. And there will be more with the various anniversaries of the collapse of Communism in what used to be Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. One recent example is historian Timothy Garton Ash’s two-part article in The New York Review of Books (5 November 2009 issue).
Ash wrote: “An erroneous report on Radio Free Europe that a student called Martin Šmid had been killed, in the suppression of the November 17, 1989, student demonstration in Prague, helped to swell the protesting crowds in the first days of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. (In what seems to me the best, and certainly the most amusing, of the retrospective chronicles, György Dalos tells how the student came home the next evening to be told by a somewhat agitated father that he was reportedly dead.“ We will look at this story in some detail below.
November 17th is a national holiday in the Czech Republic and in Slovak Republic: the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day. One of more intriguing stories from the annals of Cold War history has to be the one surrounding the immediate events of 17 November 1989 that directly led to the collapse of Communism known as the Velvet Revolution and the Gentle Revolution in the respective countries.
On Friday, 17 November 1989, there was a huge, sanctioned march and demonstration in Prague in honor of International Students Day as well as the commemoration of Jan Opletal who was shot by German occupiers during a protest demonstration in Prague that day in 1939. An estimated 15-20,000 students gathered near Charles University in the afternoon.
Afterwards the students proceeded to a candlelight ceremony on Prague’s famous Vysehard cemetery, where Czech national heroes are buried. The students then marched towards the center of Prague and the crowd swelled. Shouts were heard encouraging the crowd to head towards Wenceslas Square, the traditional site of demonstrations. But along the way, a barricade of riot police blocked the march.
There is no accurate count of the demonstrators on 17 November 1989, but some estimated it to have been over 50 thousand. Demonstrators that night called for the ouster of the Communist regime and an end to Communism. Many students sat down on the streets in response to police requests to leave the area but thousands did leave. At about 8:30 that night, it was estimated that 10,000 were still staging a sit in and refusing to leave the area. More police or militia arrived and blocked the street at the other end. In effect the crowd, including foreign journalists, was trapped between the police lines.
What had started off as a peaceful demonstration ended in a brutal and bloody action, when police and other forces attacked the demonstrators and accredited Western journalists observing the action. For example, journalist Paula Butterini of the Chicago Tribune so was severely beaten that her head wounds required 16 stitches in a local hospital. The video camera of one CNN reporter was taken from him as 3 plainclothes policemen continually hit him with nightsticks. A BBC reporter was knocked unconscious. Other reporters also had their photo and video equipment taken from them under brute force. Another journalist had to be transported to Germany because of the leg injuries and a concussion from the blows he received. The United States Embassy officially protested the police actions against accredited and identified American journalists.
Numerous persons in the crowd were injured and taken away in busses for treatment. Others refused medical assistance for fear of giving their names and later suffering police reprisals.
Near the end of the police attacks, a “student” lay on the ground, seemingly unconscious from the police blows he had received. He was covered with a blanket and taken away by police transport. Word soon spread that he had been beaten to death. The dead student was identified as Martin Smid, a mathematics student from Prague's Charles University.
Dissident Petr Uhl, who ran a small alternative news agency, received reports of Smid’s dead the next day from a woman who had been identified as Smid’s friend. Uhl in turn informed various foreign news agencies including Reuters and Radio Free Europe. Reports of Smid’s death were heard the next day via radio broadcasts from the BBC, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, among others.
Watch BBC Footage Reporting Smid's Death
The Communist regime responded by denying the reports and publicly producing not one student but two with the name Martin Smid, who were interviewed on Czechoslovak Television to prove that they were alive. A government spokesman described western news agencies that reported the death of Martin Smid as “a deliberate manipulation of people’s minds and an effort to arouse hostile emotions.” Petr Uhl was arrested for spreading false information.
 This event did not quell the groundswell of protests against the regime that led to larger protests and threats of public strikes if the Communists did not cede power. On 22 November 1989, for example, an estimated 200,000 people gathered in Wenceslas Square demanding the end of the Communist regime, which would peacefully come in a few days.
An investigation into the November 17th events by the new democratic government showed that the “dead student” was actually a Czechoslovak Intelligence officer named Ludvík Zifčák who had infiltrated the student movement under the name Milan Růžička, code name “Rudy.“ Zifčák was dismissed from the new intelligence service in July 1990. In 1994 he was found guilty of “abuse of power“ and sentenced to 18 months in prison. After losing his appeal, he served 16 months.
In 2003, Martin Smid was interviewed on Czech Radio and said, “I can't understand how the rumor came about in the first place, and why my name was chosen. And the whole thing has another strange aspect for me as well. I became the centre of attention for the whole nation, without knowing why, without knowing what I could do for my country. ... To this day I ask myself again and again: why did it happen and why me?"
The answers most likely will never come.
 Author of Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989 and the soon-to-be published Radio Free Europe's 'Crusade for Freedom': Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960, Richard H Cummings has, to say the least an interesting background - for example he served as West European Director of Security and gives presentations at numerous international academic conferences such as the 2009 Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: Successful CIA Covert Operations in the Cold War CIA & US Foreign Policy Conference, UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies in Dublin, Ireland.
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