Václav Havel
Václav Havel was a Czech lawmaker, author, poet, dramatist, and former dissident who lived from 5 October 1936 until 18 December 2011. Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to its split in 1992, and subsequently the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of any country after communism fell. He is well-known in Czech literature for his plays, essays, and memoirs.
Havel rose to popularity as a playwright after his scholastic opportunities were hampered by his bourgeois upbringing and his freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Havel employed an absurdist manner to critique the Communist system in works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum. He became increasingly politically involved after participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and he helped create various dissident projects, including Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His political actions led him under the scrutiny of the StB secret police, and he was imprisoned many times, the longest of which lasted nearly four years, between 1979 to 1983.
Havel's Civic Forum party was instrumental in overthrowing the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He took office soon after and was re-elected in a landslide the following year and after Slovak independence in 1993. Havel was influential in the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the expansion of NATO membership eastward. Many of his positions and policies, such as his opposition to Slovak independence, condemnation of the treatment of Sudeten Germans, such as the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II, and granting general amnesty to all those imprisoned during the Communist era, were highly divisive on the domestic front. By the end of his presidency, he was more popular abroad than he was at home. Following his presidency, Havel continued to work as a public intellectual, founding many initiatives including as the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, the VIZE 97 Foundation, and the Forum 2000 annual conference.
Havel's political thought was characterized by anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activity, and direct democracy. From 2004 until his death, he was a member of the Czech Green Party. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, and the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award during his lifetime. The academic year 2012-2013 at the College of Europe was named in his honor. Some belief him to be one of the twentieth century's most prominent intellectuals. In 2012, Prague's international airport was renamed Václav Havel Airport Prague.
