The first post-Communist President of Czechoslovakia (and the Czech Republic after the break up of 1993) Vaclav Havel passed away on December 18, 2011.
He will always be remembered as a great humanitarian who fought a brave war against single-party dictatorship and restored democracy to his country.
However, he has also been criticised for being slavishly pro-US and Western Europe and for deeming the Cold War as one of Evil Communism versus Godly US And Western European Democracy.
Read all about him here, from Wikipedia.
Vaclav Havel (October 5, 1936 - December 18, 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
He was the 10th and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).
He wrote over 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Havel received the US Presidential Medal Of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order Of Canada, the Freedom Medal of the Four Freedoms Award and the Ambassador Of Conscience Award.
He was also voted 4th in Prospect magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.
He was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration On European Conscience And Communism.
At the time of his death he was Chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.
Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovakia.
After the Prague Spring, he became increasingly active.
In 1977, his involvement with the human rights manifesto Charter 77 brought him international fame as the leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia.
It also led to his imprisonment.
The 1989 Velvet Revolution launched Havel into the presidency.
In this role, he led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy.
His 13 years in office saw radical change in his nation, including its split with Slovakia, which Havel opposed, its accession into NATO and start of negotiations for membership in the European Union, which was attained in 2004.
Havel was born in Prague. He grew up in a well-known and wealthy entrepreneurial and intellectual family, which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to the 1940s.
His father, Vaclav Maria Havel, was the owner of the suburb Barrandov which was located on the highest point of Prague and of Barrandov film studios.
Havel's mother, Bozena Vavreckova came from a well known family. Her father was an ambassador and well-known journalist.
Because of Havel's bourgeois history, the Communist regime did not allow Havel to study formally after he had completed his required schooling in 1951.
In the first part of the 1950s, the young Havel entered into a four-year apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant and simultaneously took evening classes.
He completed his secondary education in 1954.
For political reasons, he was not accepted into any post-secondary school with a humanities programme.
Therefore, he opted to study at the Faculty Of Economics of Czech Technical University in Prague but dropped out after two years.
In 1964, Havel married proletarian Olga Splichalova, much to the displeasure of his mother.
The intellectual tradition of his family compelled Havel to pursue the humanitarian values of Czech culture.
After military service (1957–59), he worked as a stagehand in Prague and studied drama by correspondence at the Academy Of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU).
His first publicly performed full-length play, besides various vaudeville collaborations, was The Garden Party (1963).
It won him international acclaim.
It was soon followed by The Memorandum, one of his best known plays and the The Increased Difficulty Of Concentration, all at the Balustrade.
In 1968, The Memorandum was also brought to The Public Theatre in New York, which helped establish his reputation in the United States.
The Public continued to produce his plays over the next few years, although after 1968 his plays were banned in his own country.
Havel was unable to leave Czechoslovakia to see any foreign performances.
During the first week of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel provided a commentary on the events on Radio Free Czechoslovakia in Liberec.
Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active.
He was forced to take a job in a brewery, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience.
This play, along with two other Vanek plays (so-called because of the recurring character Ferdinand Vanek, a stand in for Havel), became distributed in samizdat form across Czechoslovakia.
