Václav Havel was supposed to be remembered as a Czech playwright. He had been a successful absurdist dramatist whose plays were banned after the 1968 Soviet invasion, a dissident essayist known mainly inside the samizdat underground, and a political prisoner with three jail terms to his name. Then, in 1989, he was transformed from a dissident into the leader of his country: elected President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989 — the first President of the Czech Republic from February 2, 1993 to February 2, 2003. He died on December 18, 2011, at the age of 75.
The standard English-language biography is Michael Žantovský’s Havel: A Life (2014). Havel’s own essays, collected in Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965–1990 and The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice (1997), are themselves central documents. Among the most important scholarly treatments, see Jacques Rupnik’s Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (2015).
Early Life and the Theatre of the Absurd
Havel was born in Prague on October 5, 1936 into a wealthy intellectual family. His grandfather had built parts of the Lucerna Palace and the Barrandov film studios. The family’s property was confiscated by the communists after the 1948 coup — the adolescent Havel was excluded from university education because of his bourgeois background. The experience shaped him. Havel worked as a stagehand at the ABC Theatre and the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), and in the early 1960s his own plays began to be staged there.
Havel’s first major plays — The Garden Party (1963), The Memorandum (1965), The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968) — were a Czech form of the theatre of the absurd. The Memorandum, his most celebrated early play, was an office satire in which employees are forced to learn a synthetic language, Ptydepe, and the whole organization grinds to a halt. The plays were politically and theatrically significant. They demonstrated that the Czech theatre could produce world-class work, and they did so in a form that was critical of the bureaucratic system without being crudely political.
The Prague Spring of 1968 changed everything. The reforms of Alexander Dubček briefly created a more open Czechoslovak society, and Havel was one of the most prominent writers in the new public space. The Soviet invasion of August 21, 1968 ended the experiment. The “normalization” that followed was severe; Havel was banned from publication, his plays were removed from the repertoire, and his passport was confiscated.
The Dissident
Havel refused to be silenced. He took work in a brewery and continued to write; his plays circulated as samizdat, the clandestine self-published texts of the Soviet-bloc dissident culture. In 1975 he wrote an open letter to Gustáv Husák, the Czechoslovak president, on the plight of the Czech rock group the Plastic People of the Universe, who had been arrested earlier that year. The letter, published in the West, brought Havel to international attention as a defender of cultural freedom.
In January 1977 Havel was one of the three original spokespeople — with Jan Patočka and Jiří Hájek — of Charter 77, a declaration calling on the Czechoslovak government to honor its own human rights commitments under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Patočka died in March 1977 after a long interrogation by the security services. The Charter, with Havel as its most prominent voice, became the focus of Czechoslovak dissident life for the next twelve years.
The regime responded with severe repression. Havel was imprisoned three times: from May 1979 to February 1983, the longest sentence, after a trial in which he was defended by his brother Ivan and the playwright Pavel Kohout; briefly in 1989, after the January palach anniversary protests; and, in connection with Charter 77, for several months in 1977–78. His Letters to Olga, a collection of letters to his wife, were smuggled out of prison and published abroad. They are among the most remarkable documents of the dissident literature.
The Velvet Revolution
The transition that became known as the Velvet Revolution began on November 17, 1989, with a student march in Prague commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi closure of Czech universities. The march was attacked by riot police. The next day, the death of a student named Martin Šmíd, initially reported as caused by the police beating, brought tens of thousands of people into Wenceslas Square. Within five days, 200,000 were there. Havel, by then the unofficial leader of the opposition, addressed the crowd from a balcony of the Melantrich building and quickly became the symbolic head of the new Civic Forum.
The regime collapsed. On November 24, the entire Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party resigned. On November 29, the federal parliament removed the constitutional provision guaranteeing Communist Party supremacy. On December 29, 1989, Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia by the still-communist federal parliament. He had been a political prisoner a few weeks earlier. The transition took forty-two days; it cost the lives of perhaps a dozen people in street violence; it is the only example of a successful transition by popular movement in the Eastern bloc.
The Presidency and the Dissolution
The presidency was the most difficult job of Havel’s life. The transition from a planned to a market economy produced the 1991 “voucher privatization” scheme, designed by the economist Dušan Tříska and the prime minister Václav Klaus; Havel was initially skeptical and came to support the scheme. The political future of Czechoslovakia itself was the more difficult question. Slovak nationalism, encouraged by the Slovak prime minister Vladimír Mečiar, made a federal continuation impossible. Havel resigned the federal presidency on July 20, 1992, and was elected the first president of the Czech Republic on January 26, 1993.
He served two more terms. His second term began with a crisis in which the government of Václav Klaus was barely able to pass a vote of confidence; the Klaus government was replaced by a caretaker government, and Havel’s speeches during the crisis were a moment of moral authority. His health deteriorated in the late 1990s; he had surgery for colon cancer in 1998 and respiratory problems thereafter. He did not run for a fourth term in 2003.
Havel’s Political Thought
Havel’s political essays are among the most important documents of the late twentieth century. His 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” (originally written under the pseudonym “Václav Benda” was later republished under Havel’s name) developed the idea of the “post-totalitarian” system: a regime that survives not on terror but on the complicity of the population, in which the system is preserved by the routine behaviors of ordinary people — the greengrocer who puts the “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his window not because he believes it but because everyone does. The argument had a Tolstoyan and Christian quality; it was also a description of how to resist: by refusing the complicity, by “living in truth.”
The essays have been criticized as insufficiently political. They do not offer a program. They do not have a theory of transition. Their argument is essentially moral. The criticism is partly fair, and partly beside the point. Havel was not a political theorist in the academic sense. He was a writer who, in a particular moment, articulated the moral basis of resistance. The argument was not designed to be a plan for the transition. It was designed to make the plan possible.
Havel and the 2022 War
Havel’s last years coincided with the rise of Vladimir Putin and the return of an aggressive Russian foreign policy. Havel was one of the most prominent European voices for the principle that the post-Cold War order in Europe required continued support for democratic governments in the post-Soviet space. His 2008 essay “A Eulogy for an Independent Europe” was a warning about Russian policy that the European Union and the United States did not fully heed. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Havel was widely cited in the Czech Republic and elsewhere as the kind of European leader the post-Cold War settlement had lost.
Legacy
Havel was one of those rare figures in modern politics whose moral authority and political effect seemed to be in the same person. He did not survive long enough to see the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The country he led, the Czech Republic, was one of the most consistent European supporters of Ukraine in 2022. The legacy is, in this sense, still being measured.