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With the fall of communism, it was not long before foreign investors began taking an interest in Czechoslovakia. This ranged from huge industrial multinationals to young college graduates, who arrived in Prague with backpacks in the early 1990s, and happened to spot a business opportunity. Many burned their fingers; some made a quick buck and disappeared, and others settled down and stayed here for good. In 1991, Radio Prague interviewed a few of these pioneering investors.

The former Czech president Václav Havel on Saturday received Germany’s prestigious Quadriga award at a gala ceremony in Berlin held on the 19th anniversary of the reunification of Germany. The award was also bestowed on the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, as well as musician Marius Mueller-Westernhagen and human rights activist Baerbel Bohley. The annual award is sponsored by Werkstatt Deutschland, a non-profit organization based in Berlin and consists of a small statue resembling the quadriga at the top of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a cash prize of 25,000 Euros.

Two decades ago the attention of the world’s media was on the West German Embassy in a normally quiet corner of Prague, where thousands of East Germans were living in a makeshift camp, desperate to escape from communism. On the 30th of September, 1989 the then West German foreign minister made a dramatic announcement: those refugees were free to emigrate to the West.

For a few weeks just after the fall of communism, Radio Prague went silent. Its days as a tool in the Cold War were over. After huge staff cuts, and with the old communist managers gone, Radio Prague went back on air early in 1990. A new era began for the English Section, and with so many sweeping social and economic changes under way, there was plenty to report about.

During Václav Havel’s first year as Czechoslovak president, Prague Castle saw a string of visitors from around the world. And they did not just include heads of state and other political dignitaries. On January 21 1990, one of the first foreign guests to be received by the new president was none other than the legendary American rock musician, Frank Zappa, who had been one of the inspirations for the Czech underground movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s, including Havel himself.

The Year 1989 through the Eyes of Photographers is the title of a new exhibition that has just got underway at Prague’s Old Town Hall. It brings together around 300 photographs capturing events preceding the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, and the drama of the Velvet Revolution itself. Daniela Mrázková of Czech Press Photo is the exhibition’s curator.

On December 29 1989, Czechoslovakia’s Federal Parliament elected Václav Havel as the country’s president. In one of the many paradoxes of the Velvet Revolution, this was the same communist-dominated parliament that had previously fought so hard to stem the flow of change.

In last week’s From the Archives, we heard Jaroslav Hutka, singing at the huge demonstration that took place in Prague’s Letná park on November 25 1989. This was over a week after the Velvet Revolution had begun, but the hard liners in the communist party were still clinging on to power. The demonstration was a sign of the huge momentum for change that had built up in the previous days, and despite the cold weather, with sleet and snow, it was attended by nearly a million people.

The wheels of Czech justice are famously slow to turn, with court cases dragging on for what seems like – and often is – years. But how about this one for size: in the early days of the Velvet Revolution, in November 1989, three students of architecture described their Communist professor as an arrogant careerist and demagogue. He later demanded an apology, and took them to court. Twenty years on, and the case is still unresolved.

Last week we heard how a song, Marta Kubišová’s “A Prayer for Marta”, came to symbolize the period of the Velvet Revolution. But there were other songs and singers who also captured the spirit of the time. One of them was Jaroslav Hutka. After signing Charter 77, he had been bullied into exile in 1978, and all his songs and recordings banned. As soon as the revolution of November 1989 began, he came back home, and in one of the most moving moments of the period, he appeared at the vast demonstration held on Prague’s Letná Plain on November