VÁCLAV HAVEL, playwright, philosopher and president of the Czech Republic played not just a central role in the 1989 overthrow of communism but in his country’s national life for years afterwards. He remained what he had always been: a dissident.
His principled opposition to the diehard communist regime installed after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion made him a quintessential eastern European nonconformist. He later became an eloquently sceptical celebrant of the freedoms brought by the anti-communist revolts.
He held to his essential, paradoxical beliefs: the need to speak the truth, and to beware the power of words. For Havel, a once-banned writer, truth and words were the only weapons he allowed himself. He will be remembered as a symbol of the struggle against Soviet dominance, and as leader of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet” revolution.
Havel was born in Prague on October 5th, 1936, into Czechoslovakia’s haute bourgeoisie. His family owned a property empire, confiscated after the communists were elected in 1948. He grew up in a house full of servants and among intellectual friends of his parents. He was precocious, writing his first “philosophical book” at 13. Because of his bourgeois background, the communists after 1948 denied Havel a proper secondary education. He spent five years as a laboratory assistant in his teens, continuing his studies at a night school.
His immersion into Prague’s artistic underground really began when he became a stagehand for the Theatre on the Balustrade in 1960, amid a Moscow-inspired thaw that later blossomed into the Prague Spring. Here he met Olga Splichalova, a working-class girl who became his confidante and protector. They married in 1964.
The 1968 invasion found them in Liberec, north of Prague, where opposition was briefly strong. Havel later recalled that what struck him most about that August week was the futility of military power confronted by unarmed civilians. The end of the Prague Spring plunged Czechoslovakia into depression. Unlike others, Havel refused to go into exile, even after writings of his were banned in 1969.
In 1975 he wrote an open letter to Gustav Husak, Communist Party general secretary, lamenting the country's "inner decay for the sake of outward appearances". It proved a rallying cry for a growing dissident community, including the influential rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Havel became the leader the movement sought. The result was Charter 77, a manifesto that, 12 years later, found its fullest expression in Civic Forum, the anti-communist movement. It recognised "only . . . the authority of truth and the authority of conscience that demand it speak the truth".
Speaking the truth cost Havel dearly. He was put under house arrest in 1978 and jailed a year later. He suffered badly but, released in 1983, had a burst of creativity, writing three plays and publishing samizdat essays. The best known is The Power of the Powerless, a 1978 essay on dissidence that galvanised dissidents and established him as a pre-eminent intellectual.
Havel claimed little interest in politics. But on his release from another brief prison term in summer 1989, the first cracks in east European communism were showing with the election victory of the Polish free trade union, Solidarity.
A week after the Berlin Wall tumbled in November, student-led protests in Prague’s Wenceslas Square escalated. A group of opposition activists looked to Havel, just returned from his country house in Bohemia, for leadership. He took command of the “velvet” revolution, transformed from shy intellectual into shrewd political tactician.
“Havel to the Castle,” the demonstrators shouted, and on a wave of emotion after the leadership collapsed he was swept into the presidency, taking on the role on December 29th, 1989. In his 1990 New Year’s address, Havel set out themes to which he returned as president, first of Czechoslovakia, whose dissolution he opposed, and, from February 1993, of the Czech Republic. These were the importance of integration into Nato and the European Union, and creating a civil society. They sat uneasily with the centralising tendencies of Vaclab Klaus, the prime minister who eventually lost a battle with Havel for Czech hearts and minds.
Havel brought enormous dignity to the presidency. But as an intellectual he could exhibit disdain for elected politicians. His role in rescuing the country from paralysis after inconclusive elections in 1996 and late 1997, when Klaus was forced to resign, is controversial. He alienated all parties at some time, none more so than Klaus’s Civic Democrats, whom he accused of allowing greed and corruption to flourish.
Havel was an anti-communist, but also, in the dehumanised climate of the cold war, a great human figure. Kind, wise and modest, he was a bohemian in the true and original sense. He accepted the role destiny assigned to him, and played it beautifully.
Olga died of cancer in January 1996, and there were no children. Later that year, Havel, a heavy smoker, was struck by cancer. He never fully recovered from surgery to remove part of a lung. He is survived by his second wife, Dagmar Veskrnova, whom he married in January 1997.
– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)