The hero of the revolution

Prague is an amazing city, as good as everyone says it is, and as someone who has spent the last two decades traipsing up and down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in some guise or another, I was struck by its uncanny resemblance to Edinburgh.
Both cities boast a castle on a hill, though Prague’s is much more fantastical than Edinburgh’s rather dour, but very practical, edifice. Both have a long narrow street heading down from the castle to the national parliament, though in this case it is Edinburgh’s building that is of the stuff of fantasies.
And both boast a New Town, where courageous city planners of old built a spectacular modern addition to an ancient settlement, transforming both cities from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
But only Prague has a Museum of Communism, tucked away in its New Town, in the faded, but still elegant Palace Savarin. It shares a landing with a casino and is one floor above the city’s largest McDonalds.
The museum, which was created by a young American Glenn Spicker, tells the story of Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime, from the post war euphoria of liberation to the brutal reality of Stalinism and the Russian invasion of 1968.
It tracks the growing democratic movement, from the “psychedelic band of Prague”, the Plastic People of the Universe (who says pop music can’t change the world?), through to Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989 when hundreds of thousands of Czechs stood up to the guns of the communist regime with nothing more than flowers, right on their side and placards of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Remember Gorby? The Soviet leader whose smiling face was once as well known as Tony Blair’s. The man whose innate understanding, and cheerful acceptance, of democracy led directly to the ending of the Cold War and the liberation of Eastern Europe from the shackles of totalitarianism.
It is no exaggeration to say his courageous diplomacy changed the world for the better. He is still quietly active in world affairs, but he is no longer the political superstar he once was. We should never forget, however, that without his determination and bravery, the Soviet empire would probably still exist.
It is not just the people of Prague, in their hip European capital, who have cause to thank Gorby, it is all of us. He changed our world for the better.