Václav Havel

I

Introduction

Václav Havel, born in 1936, Czech political leader, dramatist, and essayist. Havel was a leader in the democratic opposition movement that helped bring about the collapse of the Communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992. After Czechoslovakia dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in January 1993, Havel served as president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.

II

Early Years

Havel was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the son of a commercial real estate developer. In 1948, when Havel was a young teenager, a Communist regime backed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) took power in Czechoslovakia. Havel’s upper-middle-class background severely limited his chances for formal education under the Communist system. However, his family’s extensive private library enabled him to educate himself in the classics of world literature and philosophy. Havel worked through his teen years as a laboratory assistant and attended secondary school in the evenings. In 1959 he began working as a stagehand and assistant director with a Prague theater company and studied dramatic arts at the Prague Academy of Film Arts. In 1963 Havel’s first play, Zahradni slavnost (The Garden Party), a satire about dehumanizing government bureaucracy, was performed in Prague. Vyrozumeni (The Memorandum), another satirical portrayal of life under Communism, was performed in 1965.

III

Dissident Activities

In 1968 Warsaw Pact troops led by the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress a democratic reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Havel denounced the invasion, and his plays were banned in Czechoslovakia. The plays were performed widely throughout Western Europe, however, and in 1969 Havel was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He was subsequently honored with other major international awards. Havel refused to leave Czechoslovakia to receive these awards, however, because of the certainty that he would not be allowed to return home.

Havel continued to speak out on behalf of human rights. In January 1977 he became one of more than 200 Czechoslovak intellectuals who signed Charter 77, a document demanding that Czechoslovakia’s government comply with its legal obligations as a signatory to the Helsinki Accords on human rights. Havel became one of the principal spokespersons for the Charter 77 movement, a human rights movement founded by supporters of the document. During this period he wrote the essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which asserted that by “living in truth” people can bring down a dictatorial regime nonviolently.

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Havel’s dissident activities earned him imprisonment from 1979 to 1983. In 1983 his book Letters to Olga, a volume of his letters to his wife from prison, was published secretly in Czechoslovakia. The book was republished widely outside the country. Havel continued to write plays during this period, notably Largo Desolato (1985), about a dissident philosopher’s crisis of conscience. He was imprisoned three more times, the last time in early 1989.

IV

Velvet Revolution

In November 1989, in the wake of democratic reforms in the USSR and mass demonstrations against the Czechoslovak government by Czechs and Slovaks, Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime began to collapse. Havel took the lead in forming Civic Forum, a coalition representing democratic forces in the Czech lands. Havel’s refusal to yield to persecution over the years had won him tremendous popular respect. Thus, when Czechs and Slovaks peacefully overthrew the Communist government in December 1989 in what came to be known as the Velvet Revolution, Havel became the parliament’s unopposed choice for president of the restored Czechoslovak republic. That month Havel was elected president in an interim capacity. In July 1990, after the country's first free parliamentary elections since 1946, he was reelected for a two-year term.