Interviews with Václav Havel

I was reluctant to accept the candidacy for a long time. I could not imagine myself to be a professional politician. I have displayed, let’s say, an occasional or political behavior throughout my entire life, but never, so called, professionally.

That came as a huge surprise, but when, I did not have too much time to think about it, and the situation culminated in such a way that my election was supposed to be some kind of climax of the revolution. And, if I suddenly declined the position, then I would, I would actually undermine the whole movement. Suddenly, suddenly, it would actually fail at the peak of the movement, suddenly it would not be able to offer any alternative.

So, I accepted it and, of course, I was in no way prepared for such a function. Not as in America where it is taught how to be president since basic school. And, therefore, I was doing many different amateur things, more so because there was no office and no tradition and we had nothing to follow. The previous president governed the state from the central committee of the party. From time to time, there was some kind of ceremony when he received an ambassador. But, other than that, it was not a functioning political office.

And, we were finding all of this out when we arrived at the Prague Castle and we, ourselves, had to come up with how things should be. We had no experience. Well, it should be said that we were excused and that, that simply the politicians, the foreign politicians were good to us. All sorts of, all sorts of faux pas, something that would be a huge faux pas today, would be automatically forgiven us.

Right in the room where I worked, there was, as we found out in the course of time, some kind of a room locked from all sides, and we did not know what was inside. So, we started to dig around and it turned out that there was a super secret telex machine of the Warsaw Pact that only the heads of states or party secretaries, general secretaries could use to send telegraphs to each other.

So, we got the keys to that room and we found that machine there. It was a computer that filled up the entire room, some kind of an ancient machine from that time. So, I sent a telex to Gorbachev saying in which I wished him all the best in the New Year since this happened on a New Year’s Day.

And then, we indirectly learnt that the Russian or Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs at that time, [Kryuchkov], in some conversation commended us for finding it so soon. They probably wanted to hide it from us since they did not know yet how things would turn out and whether they might still need it.

Václav Havel (1936-2011) was a playwright and poet who played a leading role in bringing an end to communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).

Havel was born into a wealthy, intellectual family. For political reasons he was not accepted into any post-secondary humanities program, but eventually he was able to study drama by correspondence and began publishing articles and plays. In 1968 he was a prominent participant in the “Prague Spring,” a brief period of liberalization that ended when the Warsaw Pact stationed troops in the country.

In 1976 and 1977 Havel helped lead the effort to produce the human rights manifesto known as Charter 77, which criticized the government of Czechoslovakia for failing to abide by its human rights obligations under the Czechoslovak Constitution, the Helsinki Accords, and United Nations covenants. In April 1979, Havel co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. He was imprisoned three separate times for his activities.

In 1989, Havel played a leading role in the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” which brought an end to the communist political system in Czechoslovakia. Havel was elected president of the country that year. He led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy and presided over the country’s accession into NATO. Since leaving office, Havel has committed himself to the promotion of democracy in other parts of the world such as Cuba and Burma. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2003.

The Czech Republic is a democratic country in Central Europe with a population of approximately 10.5 million people.

From 1918 until 1993, the territory now comprising the Czech Republic was part of Czechoslovakia, which from 1948 to 1989 was part of the communist bloc controlled by the Soviet Union. During this period, the communist government nationalized industry and imposed a highly repressive political system that included the use of secret police and the imprisonment of individuals who challenged the authority of the state.

In 1968, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Alexander Dubcek, attempted to relax some of the more oppressive limitations on Czechoslovak citizens by allowing greater freedom of expression and association. This period, which was known as the “Prague Spring,” ended when Warsaw Pact armies led by the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and forced the country to abandon the reforms.

In 1977, a group of dissidents led by playwright Vaclav Havel published a document known as Charter 77, which called attention to abuses of human rights by the Czechoslovak government. The initiative called upon the government to respect its international commitments on human rights as elaborated in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Charter 77 helped draw international attention to conditions within the country.

The rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in 1985 began a process of limited reform in the communist bloc. In 1989, Poland held partially free elections that saw the opposition come to power. Hungary’s communist government opened its borders and began a negotiated transition to democracy. And in November 1989, hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak citizens took to the streets to peacefully protest communist rule in what became known as the “Velvet Revolution.” On November 28, 1989, the Communist Party was forced to announce that it would cede power and allow free elections. The new parliament elected former dissident Vaclav Havel as president on December 29, 1989. As president, Havel made his country a leader in defending and supporting human rights around the world. In 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, both of which later joined the European Union and NATO.

Since its transition to democracy, the Czech Republic has developed stable and democratic systems of governance and a free market economy. Political power has rotated among several strong and competitive political parties, and free and fair elections are held. In 2013, Miloš Zeman was elected president in the first direct presidential election in the country’s history.

In the most recent Freedom in the World report from Freedom House, the Czech Republic earned a rating of “free.” The country earned the highest possible scores in overall freedom, civil liberties, and political rights.