By Lorne W. Craner

Revolutions are almost never the work of a single person, but it is surely impossible to imagine the wave of revolutionary change that swept Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 without Vaclav Havel.  His death on December 18 at the age of 75 marks the beginning of the end of an era in Europe, and in the world, but calls upon us to remember the courage and conviction of a man who stood against a system that most expected would outlive him.  That he outlived that system by more than two decades is tribute to the cause of freedom and democracy for which he fought.

Vaclav Havel shared a life story common to many of his generation in Central Europe.  Born in Prague just as Hitler’s Germany was squeezing the life out of the democracy of the first Czechoslovak Republic, he survived World War II and then suffered the punishment of the Communists for having come from a bourgeois Czech family.  Prevented from studying the liberal arts and humanities and forced into an apprenticeship in a chemical laboratory, he nonetheless remained committed to a career as a poet, author, and playwright, and began to gain international notoriety in the theater in the early 1960s.

After the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the Prague Spring, the Communist government banned his works and he was forced to take a job in a brewery.  On the first anniversary of the invasion, he wrote to Alexander Dubcek, the deposed leader of the Prague Spring, encouraging him to “tell the truth and stand by it, and reject everything that attempts to stand it on its head.”  Doing this, he wrote, “would show the people that it is always possible to maintain your ideals and backbone; that there are values, for which it makes sense to fight; that leaders still exist, in whom you can trust.”

Havel himself lived these words in his struggle against the Communist dictatorship of Czechoslovakia throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  In his writing and in his increasing political engagement, Havel became the leading Czech voice of dissent against the regime.  In 1975 he wrote an open letter Czechoslovak Communist Party Secretary General Gustav Husak, calling for him to enable the people of his country to express themselves freely.  With the publication of Charter 77, Havel and other dissidents laid out their case for their government to abide by the international human rights accords which it had signed.  Charter 77 dissidents, including Havel, were persecuted for their involvement, and Havel himself was sentenced to prison in 1979 for taking part in the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, which was established to make public the punishment of Charter 77 signatories.  It was this prison term that accentuated the various health problems that would plague him throughout his life. 

Even as neighboring countries such as Poland and Hungary began taking advantage of the opportunities of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, Havel’s Czechoslovakia held firm in the repression of dissent.  With huge protests on St. Wenceslas Square in Prague and in SNP Square in Bratislava, however, November 1989 brought about the change for which Havel had fought and which he embodied when he appeared with Dubcek – uniting 1968 and 1989 – before the protesters to encourage them in their demonstrations.  As the leader of the new Civic Forum movement, he was unanimously elected president by the Federal Assembly in December 1989 and during his term in office from 1989-2003 would oversee the transformation of Czechoslovakia from a Communist dictatorship to two, independent, democratic republics. 

Out of office, Havel never wavered in his defense of the rights of the oppressed around the world.  He was a close ally of the United States, coming to Washington to deliver a historic speech to a joint session of Congress in 1990 and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2003.  He was a tireless supporter of dissidents in Belarus, Cuba, Burma, North Korea, China, and other countries around the world.  Recently, he opened the Forum 2000 conference in Prague with a telephone call to Aung San Suu Kyi.  He helped lead the efforts of European Union member states in providing support and assistance to those imprisoned by the Castro regime in Cuba.  And even as he was nearing the end of his life, he openly criticized the Russian government for the controversial December 4, 2011 Russian Duma elections.

It is a remarkable irony that Vaclav Havel died on the first anniversary of the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, for Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless used the story of a Czech greengrocer to illustrate the struggle of the ordinary citizen in a totalitarian regime:

“Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the (Communist) slogans merely to ingratiate himself.  He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce.  He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings.  And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support.  In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie.  He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game.  He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity.  He gives his freedom a concrete significance.  His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth…”

Whether in the Velvet Revolution or in the Arab Spring, no one could match Vaclav Havel’s ability to express the fundamental longing for human dignity that ultimately exposes the fatal flaws of dictatorship.

Perhaps the best known of Vaclav Havel’s statements from 1989 is this: “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate.”  For Czechs and Slovaks, this quotation came to serve as the motto for the peaceful, democratic Velvet Revolution that Havel helped to lead.  Today it remains a strong motivation for not only Czechs and Slovaks, but many other neighbors as well, to support the cause of democracy around the world.   The spirit of Vaclav Havel lives on in all these efforts. 

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