Václav Havel
Born in 1936, playwright, former dissident. The last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-92), the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003). Now retired but still active in political life.
Václav Havel is a son of a rich Czech businessman whose fortune the communists stole after 1948. Because of his bourgeois background, Havel was not allowed to acquire an education in humanities, so he started studying economics but did not finish. After that he worked as a stagehand, studying drama at the same time. His first play as a dramatist was “The Garden Party” (1963), which immediately won him international acclaim; the play “The Memorandum” was presented in New York in 1968. After the Prague Spring of 1968 he was banned from all theatres in his own country and for some time he even worked in a brewery. For his anti-communist activities he had to serve many prison sentences, the longest for four years, 1979-83.
Havel was special among the new leaders of the states of East-Central Europe. His closest counterpart was perhaps Lennart Meri in Estonia. Both were intellectuals of the highest standard. Havel was also interesting for the fact that he seemed to lack any ambition for power. Rather, he decided to stand for the Presidency from a sense of duty, because he had become a symbol of an emerging civil society.
In the dictatorship his philosophy of life used to be, as he loved to say, to “live in truth”. All else he regarded as compromise: “the very act of forming a political grouping forces one to start playing a power game, instead of giving truth priority”. He disliked struggles for power.
Havel explains the start of the revolution of 1989 as follows: “The society was demoralised, no one believed in anything, everyone was afraid – so what happened in 1989...could be nothing else than a great awakening of society. In our country the revolution got under way much later than elsewhere, but it happened quicker and it was, in its own way, more radical: we had neither ‘perestroikas’ nor communist reform games; right after the days of revolution we started to build up a democratic society”.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria