“If we don’t have hope, we don’t have anything,” said Václav Havel, the playwright, author, dissident and politician. Considered an iconoclast, a Central European version of Nelson Mandela, Havel’s role in the birth of the modern Western-oriented Czech state has made him a key figure in post-Cold War European history.
His 1986 play Disturbing the Peace summarised his thesis of leadership: “The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.” At the apt moment, Havel turned his method of civil resistance, as Timothy Garton Ash observes, “into political theatre of an electrifying kind.”
He was not just a president, but the founding president of a democratic, post-Communist Czechoslovakia and then, following Czechoslovakia’s dissolution, of the Czech Republic until 2003. His legacy is, says President Petr Pavel, in Czechia’s commitment to “values-based policies, especially human rights, which he brought to our political scene. We see him internally as irreplaceable, the period of the period, who was clear in identifying a framework to define who we are.”
Born into a wealthy family, Havel had nevertheless a common touch, emerging as the most prominent of the leaders of the Velvet or “Gentle” Revolution, a largely peaceful overthrow of 40 years of Communist rule in 1989. As Garton Ash summarises: He was a “defining figure of late 20th-century Europe. He was not just a dissident; he was the epitome of the dissident …. He was not just the leader of a velvet revolution; he was the leader of the original velvet revolution, the one that gave us a label applied to many other non-violent mass protests since 1989.”
Colour Revolutions are a 21st century variant of a continuous historical phenomenon. Some of these movements have been successful in their goal of removing a government from power via popular uprising, including Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution (2000), Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) and the Revolution of Dignity protests ten years later, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005) and Armenia’s similar Velvet Revolution (2018). They are accused of being Western initiatives, given that they are generally pro-democracy and choice, an accusation based on the role of some Western agencies in financing civil society. This would presumably make anti-democratic changes of government an anti-Western plot, but that point is seldom made.
Relatively non-violent
Most of these “revolutions” are, quite unlike the earlier French, American, Russian or Cuban versions, relatively non-violent, along the lines of Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution or the “People Power” uprising against President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. In Europe, the wave of revolutionary upheavals at the end of the Cold War was led by the turnover in power in Poland and then East Germany in 1989.
The Czech “revolutionaries” were transformationalists in that, to use John Lewis Gaddis’s criteria, they had a destination in mind and a plan to get there, which they achieved. It was a strategic path that demanded vision, resilience and putting in place local structures mostly out of the public eye.
The Communist Party had seized power in post-war Czechoslovakia on 25 February 1948. Twenty years later, attempts at reform led by Alexander Dubček, who aimed to create “socialism with a human face”, led to the Prague Spring uprising, which was brutally supressed by Warsaw Pact tanks and troops. While the Soviet military had predicted that it would take four days to quell the resistance, the fighting went on for almost eight months, by which time Dubček had been replaced by Gustáv Husák, undoing most reforms. In a country where no opposition was tolerated, dissidents operated through underground organisations, music clubs and through literature, including the work of Milan Kundera (notable for The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and Václav Havel.
Havel employed an absurdist style in his plays as a method to criticise the Communist system. In 1968 he was a prominent participant in the Prague Spring, and thereafter helped to produce the human rights manifesto known as Charter 77. The regime responded by banning writers and filmmakers, preventing travel to non-communist countries, banning foreign music and blacklisting opposition figures and their families, and private entrepreneurs. Speaking about the Prague Spring was taboo. It was, to misuse Kundera’s famous work, an unbearably dark time.
Kept going regardless
After being blacklisted for his participation in the 1968 Spring, Havel helped to found several dissident organisations, bringing him under the surveillance of the State Security (StB) secret police. He was imprisoned on three occasions for his activities, the longest between 1979 and 1983. But he kept going regardless. Havel’s Civic Forum played a central role in the Velvet Revolution which toppled Communism in 1989, though remarkably he never stood for office as a member of a political party.
Things quickly gathered pace under the permissiveness permitted by Gorbachev’s glasnost.
The time between the first public anti-government activity (the 5,000-strong Candle Demonstration) in Bratislava in March 1988 and the fall of the regime was just 18 months. After a student demonstration in Prague on 17 November 1989 turned violent, three days later the number of protesters in the capital had grown to half a million. On the 24th, the top leadership of the Communist Party, including General Secretary Miloš Jakeš, resigned. Within three weeks, the first non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948 was appointed, Havel being elected as President at the end of the month. In mid-1990 Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946, and on 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two countries in a “Velvet Divorce”, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
There were key outside supporters to the process of change, not least Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, the Czech-born Madeline Albright, who helped to consolidate democratic changes by pushing through Prague’s membership of NATO. At the news of Havel’s death in 2011, Albright said of the statesman that “(h)e was one of the great figures of the 20th century”. While there was a swell of combined factors that contributed to the change – high levels of societal mistrust, lack of access to finance, technology and markets to spark economic transformation, and lack of openness and competition of ideas – the critical catalyst came from Gorbachev’s own reforms, without which the path would probably have been quite different and slower.
With some irony
But it was a struggle owned by Czechs. Milan Kundera said with some irony of the Bohemian president: “Václav Havel’s most important work is his own life.”
“Personally, he was very inspiring, very shy and one who had a sense of the absurd. As a good observer, he was able to soak up the feeling of things, people and events around him. When he travelled, he would want to go a day early: to Brazil, to go to a bar to observe; to Chile, to travel to Easter Island; to Australia, to visit the Aboriginal people,” says Pavel Fischer, the Senator who served as his director of communication and, later, adviser on foreign and security policy. “This was his method of apprehending the world.”
The nature of the revolution and the dark, conservative period of Communist rule has left a deep imprint on Czech society and mindset, including on its foreign policy. President Pavel casts the battle in Ukraine as a conflict not only about territory and of regional impact, but as one that tests the strength of democratic aspirations − as well as democratic solidarity − in the face of aggression by a state armed with power and the desire to subjugate another people and society. Supporting Ukraine is thus about supporting “rules of order” in international relations rather than having Russia’s “rules of power” prevail.
Czechia has similarly been an outspoken proponent of supporting Taiwan since “we want to be an actor of international law,” says Pavel Fischer, the chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Security in the Czech Senate. This goes beyond a need to keep Taiwan on the international agenda as a means of deterrence. Prague has also openly courted Taiwan both for investment and given its support for democracy. “We are accused of not sticking to the one China policy,” says Daniel Drake, a spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “But as my minister says, we have a one China policy. It’s just our one China policy.”
Tough line
Prague’s tough line on Russia and authoritarianism per se is not based only on the deprivations of its Communist past. There are deeper, equally dark ghosts.
Under the Munich conference of 1938 Nazi Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom agreed that Czechoslovakia would surrender its border regions and defences (the so-called Sudeten region) to Germany as a means supposedly of preventing a wider war.
All of the Czech part of the country was occupied by the Nazis in March 1939. During the occupation, more than 300,000 citizens were murdered, the majority of them Jews.
Reprisal killings were especially harsh after the assassination of one of the architects of the Holocaust, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942, including the massacre of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky under spurious pretext.
The monument in Prague to the Czech resistance fighters whose attack at this spot led to the death some days later of the hated Reinhard Heydrich
Two generations of Czechs lost their freedom as a consequence, Czechoslovakia only having been born in 1918 out of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
PRAGUE SPRINGS AND SUMMERS
Cobbled streets
The smack of tyres
Underground, once
Crimes and freedom’s cries
Trams rumble
Groaning on the bend
Tourists gather
A country on the mend
The clatter
Tanks to track
Czech hedgehogs
Protection from Warsaw’s Pact
Dubcek and Havel
Providing a light
Unbearable darkness of being
Joining democracy’s fight
1938, Heydrich’s horror
Jackboots clank
Man with the iron heart
Partisans to thank
1989, a path of velvet
The clouds lifted
The unbeatable taste of freedom
The world shifted
The new normal
People history neglect
Leaps forward, we should
Never forget
A memorial to Operation Anthropoid, the operation to assassinate Heydrich
Little surprise then that Havel chose to echo the words of the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, in his 1990 New Year’s address as the newly inaugurated head of state: “People, your government has returned to you!”
The room in which the Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991
Or that Havel presided over the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in July 1991 in the Czernin Palace in the city targeted in the only major military action the Pact had ever undertaken.
“No moral authority”
“We are not only prosperous,” says Czechia deputy foreign minister Jan Marian, “but also safe, which is why we support Ukraine’s entry into the European Union and NATO.” By 1989 the Soviet model had “no moral authority as it did not deliver”, he says, though change happened at a pace few anticipated.
The drama’s main actor, Havel, said that the revolution was “simply supported by the fact that the citizens just lost their patience.” When the “snowball” started with the students’ demonstration, and the regime looked to negotiate, Civic Forum and Charter 77 had the necessary structures. “Society basically woke up,” he said.
Change came quickly in Czechoslovakia because it was overdue after the 21 frozen years after the Prague Spring. Havel was not alone in creating change, but he was representative of it. When change came, he was not alone in consolidating the political gains through economic reforms and fresh institutional structures and practices. The value of his leadership – demanding conviction, timing, self-belief and imagination — can be measured both before and later by the absence of reform.
Undoing the damage of communism was tough work. It was politically conflictual, with hard-nosed nationalist politicians having to be managed as the slog of recovery from Communist claustrophobia was under way, thereby draining the “poison” accumulated over 40 years.
“Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away,” wrote Kundera. The Velvet Revolution demonstrated the power of civil society. It later encouraged active Czech participation in global security and an emphasis on democracy and human rights as the country (later, two countries) shifted from isolation to global integration. It also enabled membership with Western institutions with which theCzech Republic now so closely identifies, a reminder of both the historical and moral dimensions of the European project. But transformation was only possible because of local energy and agency.
Three great contributions
Change would probably have occurred in Czechoslovakia without Havel, but he was able to make three great contributions, says Alexandr Vondra, his former National Security Adviser and latterly a Member of the European Parliament.
First, the nature of the regime, essentially comprising those who, in 1968, had invited the Soviets in, was very oppressive: “there was no opposition at all. In dissident groups there were many views, but due to his moral authority of never having done anything with the Communists, and having had the courage of his convictions and going to jail, he had the credibility to ensure unity, at least for the first seven years by which time the key reforms had been carried out, membership of NATO and the EU included.”
Havel was, second, “smart enough to understand that unity would not last forever, and that politics would be structured into parties. He did not thus associate himself with a political party but instead offered them a space to operate, in which the most active player became [his finance minister Václav] Klaus. While they did not like each other, Havel the artist and Klaus the boxer, they were able to put the interests of the state above their differences.”
This, he says, is very different from the example of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the differences between whom “pushed Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit.”
His final contribution is in the foreign area, “as he was instrumental in getting the United States to open the door to membership by the former Warsaw Pact countries.”
Havel was, says Vondra, “a man with conviction, which offered a certain right and wrong, but who would on some issues act with a degree of realism. He was good at finding common ground.”
[Images: main, Ben Skála – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8484278. All other images, Greg Mills]
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