Speeches that Changed the World

VÁCLAV HAVEL

Born 5 October 1936 in Prague, Czechoslovakia

In the 1950s he worked as a lab technician, was conscripted into the army, and attended technical college (1955–7) before working as a stagehand at the ABC Theatre, Prague. He began writing plays and magazine articles, becoming particularly associated with Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade. After the liberalizing ‘Prague Spring’ (1968) was crushed, his writings were banned, and he was sent to do manual labour in a brewery in 1974. He co-founded the Charter ’77 human rights group (1977) and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (1978). He was imprisoned in 1979 for subversion, until released because of illness in 1983. Through the 1980s he continued to publish abroad and in samizdat (underground) media at home. In 1989 he co-founded the Civic Forum opposition movement and, after that year’s Velvet Revolution overturned the regime, he was chosen as the Czechoslovak president. He was re-elected in 1990, but stood down in 1992. When the country split into sovereign Czech and Slovak states, he became President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003), retiring at the end of his second elected term. His accolades have been many.

In 1939, Hitler’s armies snuffed out Czechoslovakia’s independence. After the Second World War, a communist coup delivered the country to effective Soviet domination, and when the reforming Alexander Dubček attempted to liberalize the system in 1968, in the so-called ‘Prague Spring’, he incurred the armed intervention of Warsaw Pact tanks. Czechoslovakia only truly regained its freedom in the peaceful ‘Velvet Revolution’ of December 1989, when the Czech communist regime collapsed, as did others in the region. The man chosen to be the new president was the country’s leading playwright, leading dissident, and in many people’s eyes the moral conscience of the nation: Václav Havel.

It is something of a truism that literature and the arts tend to be attributed a higher status in authoritarian countries, where they are scrutinized for possible criticism of the prevailing regime, and this was certainly the case in Czechoslovakia. Havel first went into the theatre after being denied a university education (on account of his wealthy background). During the 1960s he wrote plays in a broadly ‘absurdist’ genre, slyly and wittily criticizing the illogicalities and corruptions of the communist system. But systematic repression of intellectuals and artists followed the Prague Spring, and Havel was declared a ‘class enemy’, his passport confiscated and his plays banned. He was later offered the chance to leave the country several times, but he preferred to remain a thorn in the authorities’ side, noting: ‘The solution of this human situation does not lie in leaving it.’

In 1977 the playwright, supported by hundreds of Czech intellectuals, helped to draw up the important Charter ’77 human rights document. His essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978) accused the regime of creating a society of morally corrupt individuals, and the next year he was given a four-and-a-half-year jail sentence. Yet his plays flourished abroad, he received numerous foreign prizes, and he was championed by the likes of playwright Tom Stoppard (also of Czech origin). It was difficult to ignore Havel, who became one of the world’s most high-profile political prisoners. In 1989, the Civic Forum opposition movement, which Havel had helped found, finally managed to lever the Communist Party out of government, and in December the new Czechoslovak Parliament elected Havel as the country’s president. It was an extraordinary turning of the tables.

On 1 January 1990, Havel made a broadcast to his people. It delivered, in many ways, a surprising message. It was not triumphalist; rather, it reflected on the way that a morally bankrupt regime had made its people complicit in its iniquities. He described a system that had corroded values and human feelings, creating a pervading cynicism and a sense of powerlessness. It was a powerfully crafted message, with a wider application to authoritarian regimes around the world.

Since leaving office, in 2003, Havel has continued to work on human-rights projects while also writing, including a memoir of his presidential years.

WE LIVE IN A CONTAMINATED MORAL ENVIRONMENT. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful, and that special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children’s homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all. The previous regime – armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology – reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skilfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone. It cannot do more than slowly but inexorably wear down itself and all its nuts and bolts.

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators.

Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.

. . . In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his aeroplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social or political.

The most distinguished of my predecessors opened his first speech with a quotation from the great Czech educator Comenius. Allow me to round off my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement: People, your government has returned to you!

‘We live in a contaminated moral environment’