Jaroslav Hutka wasn't even there on the Friday the revolution broke out. Hutka, a songwriter, had been living in the West for years after the communists had outlawed his songs. The images of vast crowds in Prague's inner city on November 17, 1989 reached him at his home in Cologne, Germany. Even though he arrived in Prague a short time later, for a while it looked as though he would not be part of the revolution. The Czechoslovakian border guards tried to prevent him from entering the country; Hutka was the last person communist party members wanted to see in Prague.

By then, however, the communists had long since lost their grip on the country. Other travelers recognized the singer and began beating their fists against the glass panels enclosing the transit room until the intimidated border guards finally let Hutka enter the country. That same evening, he sang to an audience of more than half a million people.

"It was unbelievable; everything seemed possible," Hutka now recalls. He has just finished performing to a tiny audience of ten people in a basement club in Prague. Although his audiences aren't always this small, the minstrel of the revolution hasn't been a superstar for some time, certainly not the kind of figure he was 15 years ago when the Czechs, then still united with the Slovaks, got rid of the communists.

Even though Mikhail Gorbachev had just proclaimed glasnost and perestroika in Moscow, and the Berlin Wall had just fallen, the people in power in Prague at the time still ordered the police to attack the city's first wave of demonstrators. But such attacks soon became futile, as they only made the crowds grow faster.

It had been 21 years since Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring uprising in 1968, but in the winter of 1989, things were suddenly moving very quickly. On November 19, Vaclav Havel and other dissidents established the Civic Forum and began negotiating with the communist party leadership. On November 14, the hard-liners on the communist party's central committee resigned. By staging a two-hour general strike two days later, the crowds forced the government to make additional concessions. Shortly before New Year's Eve, the national assembly elected Havel president. All traces of the Marxist national doctrine were removed from the constitution.

A revolution drown out by politics

Many heroes of yesterday are unhappy today. "It wasn't a revolution," says Hutka, who believes that the new government was too quick to make peace with the former oppressors and forgive their followers. "In my opinion, the Velvet Revolution was too velvety," Hutka says. The singer mourns the primordial democracy of those days, the power of the street. Today, he believes, parties determine politics, which no longer has much in common with democracy. "Today, life and politics are two completely separate spheres."

Hutka hasn't written any new songs in a long time. He used to sing about the despotic acts of the communist regime, but now he has trouble coming up with lyrics about things like health care reform, the current topic of debate in the Czech senate.

"The days of grand acts are over," says former dissident Jan Ruml. Ruml, 51, has just completed his final exams for a law degree from the University of Pilsen. Under the communists, inconvenient people like Ruml were barred from attending universities. Generations of intellectuals, prohibited from entering certain professions, earned a living shoveling coal and sweeping streets. "Today's politicians are all outstanding technocrats of power, but they have no ideals," Ruml complains. He has just resigned his seat in the Czech senate.

Now he plans to devote his energies to combating human rights violations in Cuba, China and Belarussia. "Perhaps our example can serve as a model for these countries," he says. He thinks that it's a tremendous irony of history that he, of all people, a one-time dissident, is now involved in exporting revolution.

1989 revolutionaries withdrawn

Most former dissidents have since withdrawn from politics. The former leaders of the opposition, disgusted by rampant opportunism and corruption in the government, have turned to their own personal interests. Take Marta Kubisova, a well-known singer of chansons. Back then, she sang the national anthem from the balcony of the Melantrich publishing house building. Her voice helped 200,000 people overcome their fear of the clubs wielded by the police. Today she hosts a TV show on which selected dogs and cats are matched with prospective owners.

Author Ivan Klima ("A Summer Affair") was in the Theresienstadt concentration camp as a child, and was ostracized under the communists. His past has left its mark. Klima walks slowly and suffers from back pain. "I never shared the euphoria of November 1989," he says. "Of course, I would have liked to see a more pronounced civil society, but there were probably only about 600 dissidents in the entire country. They never really had much power." Most people, he says, occupied a "gray zone" between rejecting the system and fitting in. Klima believes that these are the people who dominate the political scene today.

Nevertheless, he isn't worried about the fact that the relatively unchanged communist party recently emerged from regional and senate elections as the country's second strongest party. "Democratization is not reversible," he says.

Karl Johannes, Prince of Schwarzenberg, sits in the Slavia Cafe, with its view of Prague Castle. The famous oil painting of the poet encountering the naked, green absinthe fairy hangs on the wall. People who are addicted to politics have been coming to this cafe since the 1920s, and the prince is certainly one of them.

His family was first plagued by the Nazis and then expropriated by the communists. After the fall of communism, the Schwarzenbergs got back their lands, castles and houses. Before then, Schwarzenberg supported the dissidents for years from his home in Austria. To divert the Czechoslovakian border agents' attention away from the political documents he would smuggle in and out of Czechoslovakia, he bought pornography and scattered it around his car. In 1990, Havel appointed Schwarzenberg to be his second-in-command.

Fighting the new bureaucracy

The prince is one of the few old-timers who don't want to get out of Czech politics. Two weekends ago, he was elected to a seat in the senate. He believes that there is still much to be done. "One problem is bureaucracy," he says, speaking Czech with an Austrian accent. "We're dealing with a cross between old imperial and royal bureaucracy and Soviet bureaucracy. It's a catastrophe."

Monika Pajerova is also one of those people who still like to sit in Prague coffee houses and discuss politics. She says: "We must give people confidence again." She and her fellow students organized the demonstration on November 17, fifteen years ago. "Suddenly ten thousand people had taken to the streets. That wasn't what I had expected."

Although the Czech revolution was completely nonviolent, Pajerova, like many heroes of the past, now believes that war may be necessary to put a stop to such human rights violators as Saddam Hussein. In fact, Vaclav Havel, the most famous of all former Czech dissidents, was one of the first European heads of state to voice his support for Bush's invasion of Iraq. However, this display of fealty doesn't mean that the Czech dissidents alienated themselves from the rest of Europe. On the contrary. Pajerova, for example, now heads a movement that calls itself "Yes to Europe." "We are part of the European Union, but we still haven't won the battle. Europe's opponents are trying to put the brakes on the European constitution."