Václav Havel: from dissident playwright to president

On 29 December 1989 Václav Havel, a playwright who had been in prison earlier that year, was elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly. Six weeks before, he had been a banned writer under constant watch from the secret police. Few figures of the twentieth century moved so quickly from the margin to the centre of a state.

Havel died on 18 December 2011, and politicians of every party mourned him. This is a short biography for readers who want to know who he was and why he still matters.

Early life

Havel was born in Prague on 5 October 1936 into a prosperous family of builders, property owners and film-industry entrepreneurs; the family built Lucerna Palace on Wenceslas Square. After the communist coup of 1948 the family lost its property, and the "bourgeois" background of the young Havel closed the door to university. He trained as a laboratory assistant, did military service and in 1960 began work at the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí) in Prague, first as a stagehand. Later he studied drama by correspondence at the Academy of Performing Arts.

His early plays were produced at the Balustrade: The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965) are satires on bureaucratic language and the absurdity of institutional life. They made him a leading voice of the Czech theatre of the 1960s, in the same period as a generation of writers and film-makers whom the Prague Spring brought to wide attention, a time described in the Prague Spring and 1968 explained.

Dissent

After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and the period of "normalisation" that followed, Havel's plays were banned from Czech stages. He worked for a time in a brewery in Trutnov, an experience he drew on in his writing. His one-act plays featuring a dissident writer called Ferdinand Vaněk, among them Audience, which is set in a brewery, circulated in samizdat and were staged abroad.

In 1975 he wrote an open letter to the Communist leader Gustáv Husák, criticising the regime's effect on society. In 1977 he became one of the first spokesmen of Charter 77, the manifesto that criticised the government for failing to uphold human rights it had signed up to (the full story is in Charter 77 explained). The regime responded with arrests and interrogations. Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) analysed how an ordinary person, a greengrocer who puts up a slogan in his window, helps sustain the system by going along with it, and argued for "living in truth" as a political act. It remains his best-known political text and is widely read abroad. The background to this period is in Czechoslovakia under communism.

In 1979 he was arrested with other members of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted and sentenced to four and a half years. He served nearly four years, much of it in conditions that damaged his health. In prison he wrote letters to his wife Olga, published as Letters to Olga, which are among the most read of his works. He was released in early 1983 after a serious illness.

1989

In January 1989 Havel was arrested again after taking part in commemorations for Jan Palach and served several months before being released in May. In November 1989, after the police attacked a student demonstration in Prague on 17 November, he helped found Civic Forum, the broad movement that negotiated the communists' retreat. Crowds on Wenceslas Square called for him as president, and the Federal Assembly, after the Communist Party gave up its monopoly of power, elected him on 29 December. The events are described in the Velvet Revolution explained.

His early presidency was marked by an informal style, symbolic gestures and a demand for moral politics. He opened Prague Castle to the public, appointed dissidents and cultural figures to posts, and travelled widely to promote the new democracy. He also made unpopular decisions, including an early amnesty that released many prisoners and a statement of regret over the postwar expulsion of Germans that drew debate at home, as discussed in the Beneš decrees explained.

Presidency and the split of Czechoslovakia

Havel was re-elected in 1990 and served through the early transition, with its economic reforms, privatisation and tensions between Czechs and Slovaks. He argued for preserving the federation, but the June 1992 election produced governing parties in the two republics that wanted different things. When it became clear that Slovak representatives would not elect him again and that the federation would be dissolved, he resigned on 20 July 1992. The story of the split is in the Velvet Divorce.

After the Czech Republic came into being on 1 January 1993, Parliament elected him its first president on 26 January 1993. The post is largely ceremonial under the constitution, as explained in how the Czech president is chosen and what the role does, but Havel used his moral standing to speak on foreign policy, human rights and the direction of the country. He was re-elected in 1998 and left office in February 2003 at the end of his second term.

The writer and the thinker

Havel's plays are built on language: officials who talk in empty formulas, people who repeat slogans they no longer believe, meetings that decide nothing. The Garden Party shows a young man who rises through an institution by mastering its jargon until he loses his own identity. The same concern runs through his essays. For Havel the central danger of the communist system, and of modern societies more generally, was not only force but the habit of conformity that spreads when people stop saying what they think. His answer was a politics of small acts of honesty, which he called "living in truth", and an insistence that moral choices matter in public life.

This outlook explains much about his presidency. He distrusted party politics, preferred civic movements and personal gestures, and was uncomfortable with the market-driven economic approach of his prime minister, Václav Klaus. The two men came to represent different visions of the post-communist Czech state, a contrast that shaped debate in the 1990s. Klaus later became president himself and, as the Lisbon Treaty dragged on, called himself an EU dissident (see Czechia and the Lisbon Treaty).

Foreign policy and legacy

Havel was a prominent advocate of Czech membership of NATO and the EU. The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, during his presidency, and the NATO summit in Prague in 2002 was a high point of his time in office. He supported Western intervention in Kosovo in 1999, a position that divided opinion. He was also associated with support for human rights movements elsewhere, from Burma to Cuba. The memory of the era is covered in Czech entry into NATO and the EU.

He returned to writing in later years. His play Leaving (Odcházení), written after he left office, premiered in 2008, and in 2011 he directed a film version. He died at Hrádeček, his country house in the Krkonoše mountains, on 18 December 2011, aged 75.

His legacy is debated. Admirers see him as a moral compass and a symbol of the peaceful end of communism in Central Europe, someone who showed that the weak could challenge the powerful by refusing to lie. Critics, from the left and the right, have accused him of naivety, of being more popular abroad than at home, and of failing to confront the economic changes that followed 1989. Opinion at home has been less uniform than the international image suggests. Even so, Prague's airport, a library and numerous streets and prizes bear his name. His places in the capital are mapped in Václav Havel's Prague, and the way the state later dealt with the regime he opposed in Czechia and communist-era crimes.

Frequently asked questions

When was Václav Havel president?

Of Czechoslovakia from 29 December 1989 until he resigned on 20 July 1992, and of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.

What was Charter 77?

A 1977 manifesto signed by Czech and Slovak citizens criticising the communist government for failing to respect human rights. Havel was one of its first spokesmen.

Was he in prison?

Yes, several times. The longest sentence, from 1979, lasted nearly four years.

What are his best-known works?

The plays The Garden Party and The Memorandum, the essay The Power of the Powerless and the prison letters collected as Letters to Olga.

To go further, pick one of the essays or plays above and read it alongside a short history of the 1970s.