Václav Havel

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright whose absurdist comedies and essays made him the best-known critic of communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Repeatedly jailed as a dissident, he led the Civic Forum movement in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and became the last president of Czechoslovakia, then, from 1993 to 2003, the first president of the Czech Republic.

Havel, born in Prague on 5 October 1936, came from a rich family of property developers and entrepreneurs: his grandfather had built the Lucerna entertainment complex on Wenceslas Square, and an uncle founded the Barrandov film studios. After the communist takeover his "class background" barred him from university humanities courses. He trained as a chemical laboratory assistant while finishing school at evening classes, studied economics briefly, and did military service from 1957 to 1959.

Havel found work as a stagehand in Prague, first at the Theatre ABC and then at the Theatre on the Balustrade, while studying drama by correspondence. His play The Garden Party (1963) brought international notice, followed by The Memorandum, which reached New York in 1968. Both used absurd, circular bureaucratic language to mock the workings of the communist system. In 1964 he married Olga Šplíchalová.

During the Warsaw Pact invasion that ended the Prague Spring in August 1968, Havel broadcast for a clandestine resistance radio station. Afterwards his plays were banned at home and he took a job in a brewery, which inspired his play Audience. In 1977 he was among the founders of Charter 77, a human rights manifesto prompted partly by the trial of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. His essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) argued that citizens under communism were forced to "live within a lie". He co-founded a committee to defend the unjustly prosecuted in 1979, and that May was jailed for almost four years; his letters from prison became Letters to Olga.

In 1989 Havel's Civic Forum became the main voice of the protests in the Velvet Revolution that brought down Czechoslovakia's communist government, part of the wider Revolutions of 1989. On 29 December 1989 the Federal Assembly unanimously elected him president. Free elections in 1990, the first in 44 years, gave Civic Forum and its Slovak partner a sweeping win.

Havel declared amnesties for prisoners, which critics blamed for a rise in crime, and called the post-war expulsion of the Sudeten Germans immoral, which angered many at home. He counted helping to dissolve the Warsaw Pact as his greatest achievement and pressed for former Soviet-bloc states to join NATO. He opposed splitting the federation, and when Slovak deputies blocked his re-election and Slovakia declared independence, he resigned in July 1992. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, he was elected first president of the Czech Republic on 26 January 1993 and re-elected in 1998, his constitutional powers limited but his moral authority large. He often enjoyed more popularity abroad than at home.

Havel's wife Olga died in 1996; he married the actress Dagmar Veškrnová in 1997 and survived lung cancer. He left office in February 2003, succeeded by his rival Václav Klaus. He hosted the annual Forum 2000 conferences, backed human rights campaigns and green politics, and returned to the stage with the play Leaving (2008). He died at his country house at Hrádeček on 18 December 2011, aged 75. Prague's airport was renamed after him in 2012.

Our 1985 map shows the communist Czechoslovakia he opposed, and the 1994 map shows the Czech Republic and Slovakia as separate states after the split he had tried to prevent.