Interviews with Václav Havel

I think that it became clear very soon that the most important task, at least I perceived it as my most important task, it was to cement our country firmly in the new situation. Modern history teaches us that here, in the center of Europe, in such a place that is an intersection of various flows, movements, influences throughout the centuries, it is a sort of crossroad of spiritual and power flows and the like.

It is hugely important how firmly it is rooted and what the structure, the political structure, the political world order will look like after the fall of the iron curtain, what replaces the previous bipolar division. And specifically, I saw this urgency in that fast and massive expansion of NATO that included our countries, not only our country, but other European countries as well, and in the expansion of the European Union, also including our countries.

In that, I saw a perspective of the alliance, cooperation, partnership, integration, and cementing of the country. And, everything was subordinated to this effort. I also made many visits, no matter how short, to various countries where I was explaining or promoting or suggesting this in some way.

I think, that it is easier and faster to arrange for free elections, to abolish censorship, to establish democratic institutions, to support formation of political parties, the right to assemble, the freedom of speech, those are all things that can be achieved relatively quickly. What cannot be, as it appears, achieved quickly is transformation of mentality. There is certain cultivation of society, or, it is in fact a question of moral revolution.

We all here, who experienced communism, were deformed without even realizing it by the need to constantly cower and take care only of ourselves and the like. It turned out that those who were little kids at that time are also tainted by this since they saw their parents doing it. And that takes a long time and it is a question of maybe two generations before the political culture really transforms in such a way that we will not really worry about calling it, calling it democracy.

It’s been taking longer than we all expected. Moreover, the massive privatization is making it more difficult. Here, everything was completely owned by the state, more than in other countries. Every last barbershop was nationalized and now it has to be quickly given to some private owners without even having specific laws in place in time, etc.

That meant opening the field to many various crooks and mafia. And, this was also interconnected with an immature democratic culture. That is a really difficult thing, more difficult than transforming institutions.

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.