News

dsaunders@globeandmail.com

In 1989, Jirka Meska was in the business of making information move, as fast as possible, around the communist state of Czechoslovakia.

Officially, that meant he was among the country's highly protected elite software engineers, responsible for writing operating systems and networking applications for the primitive mainframes of the Eastern Bloc.

Unofficially, he had discovered more effective information-spreading techniques. As a secret link to the country's anti-authoritarian underground network called Charter 77, he was capable of helping cause 10,000 people to appear at a protest suddenly, or to stop work for a day, an escalating wave of actions that played a key role in bringing down the government.

"It got to the point that half the country could know something within a few hours, even though it couldn't be mentioned in any of the media or spoken over the phone," the bearded programmer said the other day in his Prague campus office.

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, and the communist government in neighbouring Czechoslovakia joined its neighbours in giving up power six weeks later, the activists involved are struck by the fact they were able to communicate with a speed and efficiency that would be difficult today - even though they lacked the cellphones, e-mail networks, Twitter accounts and websites used nowadays by anti-government movements in places such as Iran.

Former resistance members in the Czech Republic and the former East Germany say there were two factors that made news move at better-than-Twitter efficiency in the revolutionary days of '89: A network of human relationships that conveyed information informally on a regular basis, and a population who were highly focused on only a few channels of information, both official and clandestine.

"You didn't have people looking at 200 different TV channels and 10,000 websites and e-mails from thousands of people," says Rainer Muller, one of the East German dissidents who brought 200,000 people onto the streets of Leipzig in October of 1989. "You could put something on a Western TV or radio station and you could be sure that half the country would know it."

The technology was often primitive, for a good reason: Using the telephone was extremely risky, and the print and broadcast media were regime-controlled.

Mr. Meska, the software engineer, held such an important position that the regime had a high threshold for his insurrection. So he became a trusted communication hub for the underground, a human router - though he resorted to a pre-digital medium to reach the nation.

"I went into the research institute's photocopy office one day with a copy of the underground secret newspaper Lidove Noviny, and I was surprised to find that the woman there let me make a copy of it," he said. "So later that day I came in and made 200 copies. And after that I became a samizdat publisher, effectively."

Each of those copies would reach hundreds of people, because they would be circulated among networks of people - not members of the underground, but ordinary citizens who were used to meeting at pubs, passing on information and rumours, and sending them along to other circles of friends the same day.

"I had a friend whose nickname was 'pamphlet' because he was always coming over to the jobsite and handing out pamphlets on various events, and whenever you went to the pub each night, you knew who were the people from the underground and they'd tell you what was up," says Frantisek Kostlan, who was a construction worker in 1989.

His interest in the Doors and Led Zeppelin was enough to get him into anti-government networks: the typically obsessive networks of music fans, ubiquitous in the eastern bloc and particularly zealous in Czechoslovakia, easily turned themselves into subversive communication webs when things got intense in 1989.

The phone was a risk - but the East Germans discovered it could be used effectively if large groups of people shared calls from public phones.

And the goal was always to reach radio and TV stations outside the Iron Curtain that reached across the border.

"We would hold a weekly telephone conference in which we would report on what was going on, and the purpose of this was to have someone different each day who could relay all the information to the Western media through West Germany - this proved an extremely effective method to reach the whole country," said Mr. Muller, the East German.

They would smuggle videotape out of the country on a weekly basis, using trusted officials who had reason to cross the Iron Curtain on a regular basis.

This meant that news coverage was delivered to the whole country the same day, despite being officially unmentionable.

For example, on Nov. 17, 1989, when 20,000 people gathered in a spontaneous protest in Prague, a rumour spread that a student had been killed by the police.

By the end of the night, the rumour had been carried on Radio Free Europe and other powerful stations, and everyone in Czechoslovakia knew about it.

Suddenly, demonstrations were attracting half a million people.

The news was also carried across borders within the Iron Curtain.

Mr. Muller would make regular clandestine trips to Czechoslovakia where he would meet with Petr Uhl, an editor of the Czech resistance newspaper.

"We were much more co-ordinated than people realize today, so that people in Czechoslovakia were able to know almost immediately what was happening in Poland and East Germany, even though it could not be reported or even mentioned in the official media," said Mr. Uhl, still a political activist and writer.

After the Berlin Wall fell in Germany, Czechs began to organize a serious resistance movement known as the Civic Forum in early November, 1989, and within six weeks it became the government.

It was launched in typical lo-fidelity fashion: Czechs, who gathered habitually at the theatre, suddenly found the actors reading anti-government news rather than lines from the play. It was massive, fast, and more effective than a text message.