page_title: Václav Havel
section_title: Political dissident
hierarchical_section_title: Václav Havel / Political dissident
caption_attribution_description: Václav Havel embraces Alexander Dubček at a meeting in the Laterna Magika theatre in Prague, at 24 November 1989. That same night the whole leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party resigns. Personality rights warningAlthough this work is freely licensed or in the public domain, the person(s) shown may have rights that legally restrict certain re-uses unless those depicted consent to such uses. In these cases, a model release or other evidence of consent could protect you from infringement claims. Though not obliged to do so, the uploader may be able to help you to obtain such evidence. See our general disclaimer for more information.
context_page_description: Václav Havel was a Czech statesman, writer and former dissident, who served as the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs.
  His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum, Havel used an absurdist style to criticize communism. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Soviet bloc's invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives, including Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the secret police and he spent multiple periods imprisoned, the longest being nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983.
  Havel's Civic Forum party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
context_section_description: During the first week of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Havel assisted the resistance by providing an on-air narrative via Radio Free Czechoslovakia station (at Liberec). Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active. Short of money, he took a job at Krakonoš brewery in Trutnov, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience. This play, along with two other "Vaněk" plays (so-called because of the recurring character Ferdinand Vaněk, a stand in for Havel), became distributed in samizdat form across Czechoslovakia, and greatly added to Havel's reputation of being a leading dissident (several other Czech writers later wrote their own plays featuring Vaněk). This reputation was cemented with the publication of the Charter 77 manifesto, written partially in response to the imprisonment of members of the Czech psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. (Havel had attended their trial, which centered on the group's non-conformity in having long hair, using obscenities in their music, and their overall involvement in the Czech underground.) Havel co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1979. His political activities resulted in multiple imprisonments by the authorities, and constant government surveillance and questioning by the secret police (Státní bezpečnost). His longest period in prison, from May 1979 to February 1983, is documented in letters to his wife that were later published as Letters to Olga.
  He was known for his essays, most particularly The Power of the Powerless (1978), in which he described a societal paradigm in which citizens were forced to "live within a lie" under the communist regime. In describing his role as a dissident, Havel wrote in 1979: "we never decided to become dissidents. We have been transformed into them, without quite knowing how, sometimes we have ended up in prison without precisely knowing how. We simply went ahead and did certain things that we felt we ought to do, and that seemed to us decent to do, nothing more nor less."
  Samuel Beckett's 1982 short play, Catastrophe, was dedicated to Havel while he was held as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia.
caption: Havel embraces the former communist leader Alexander Dubček at a meeting in the Laterna Magika theatre in Prague on 24 November 1989
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