We Can be Heroes: Vaclav Havel at 90

The 90th anniversary of Václav Havel's birth (October 5, 1936 – December 18, 2011) will be celebrated throughout 2026, featuring international exhibitions, essay competitions, and archival projects honoring his legacy as a dissident playwright, the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.

When he passed away, we lost a hero of our times, a friend of freedom, who lived his life with integrity and sent forward ripples of hope into the world. He has been missed and remembered, not only for his life, which was one full of improbable achievement, but for what he stood for.

Heroism is essential to politics. We live for the hour when a politician stands up in Theodore Roosevelt’s dusty arena and we recognize, with astonishment, that here is a person prepared to take risks, tell us what we don’t want to hear, face possible defeat for a principle, tackle insuperable odds, and by doing so, show us that politics need be not just the art of the possible, but the art of the impossible.

We are short of heroes everywhere these days, but particularly in politics. The Arab Spring appears to have consumed the leaders who rose up in the Cairo streets. In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has learned that it may actually be easier to be a saint than a politician. There are political heroes aplenty in China, but most of them are in jail. In Russia, heroic resistance to tyranny survives with many suffering persecution; elsewhere, the political elites are cravenly riding in Putin’s chariot, even if they have no idea where he is taking them. In Europe, Friedrich Merz tries to inspire respect for courage and competence but is falling in the polls; Emmanuel Macron struggles to convey authority over both an unruly parliament and an economy in crisis; and Keir Starmer seems content to be an imitation of a prime minister, not the unyielding, decisive thing itself. As for President Trump, he has courage in abundance, evidenced when he launched that seemingly impossible bid to regain the presidency. Now, as the Iran war drags on seemingly without a clear exist strategy, we also ask, can he keep up the disruption so necessary in shaking up an ossified global order without losing momentum and focus?

By dint of moral authority and spirited leadership, Havel became the face of the 1989 Eastern European democratic revolutions in the same way in which the crumbling Berlin Wall became a material monument to freedom. It was Havel, the dissident playwright who repeatedly confronted the Kremlin’s stooges in Czechoslovakia. And it was Havel the statesman who led the people of his country from the 1989 Velvet Revolution to democracy.

Across Eastern Europe and the world, Havel captured headlines and hearts.

But what is his place in history? Havel has achieved much as head of state. He led his country from the defeat of communism in 1989, to its first free elections in 1990, to its economic revival, and to its reincorporation into the international community—into NATO and soon the EU. The Velvet Revolution street crowds cried out for “freedom,” “democracy,” and a “return to Europe.” The achievement of these goals on Havel’s watch certainly represents a significant presidential accomplishment.

Despite this deserved acclaim, Havel remains something of a mystery to much of the world, especially in the U.S. and Asia. We know that “dissidenthood” brought him three prison sentences, a ban on his plays, and fame and sympathy abroad. But it is often the less-visible daily grind of persecution that wears down even the most courageous soul. This is especially true of creative people, who need freedom to fuel their imaginations. The rich archival holdings at the Hoover Institution shed light on the extent to which Havel’s everyday life and work were hindered by countless daily annoyances, big and small, and help us gain a better appreciation for the magnitude of his courage in the face of hardship.

Draw up a compelling character representing the arc of the 20th century and it might look like this – a child whose homeland is conquered by the Nazis and then occupied by communists; a playwright, essayist and dissident turned state prisoner of conscience turned leader of a victorious nonviolent revolution over a totalitarian dictatorship. He culminates his career as president of his newly liberated nation.

Vaclav Havel hated Communism with passion, but it was the making of him. The Czech dissident-playwright turned president was a product of Prague's wealthy and cultured haute bourgeoisie, and without the Communist takeover of 1948 and all that followed he would probably have lived a life of charming bohemian privilege, a chip off the old block. But with Stalin's chosen men in Prague Castle, that was never an option: Havel and his ilk were the class enemy, and were never allowed to forget it.

His class origins barred him from further education under the Communists, and he only managed to pay his way through secondary night school by working as a lab technician. His two years of army service were as a sapper – getting young toffs to clear minefields was a useful way of eliminating them.

He was turned down by the drama school at Prague University, and only succeeded in entering his chosen profession through a side door, as a stagehand. After helping set up the small, intellectual dissident group Charter 77 in 1977, to hold the Czech government to the human rights pledges it had signed up to in the Helsinki Accords of 1975, he was repeatedly sent to prison.

But the result of all these grim experiences was that when, in a bizarre twist of history, he became the people's choice for the revolution's president, he had a far more rounded understanding of his nation's realities, and a far closer acquaintance with the people's suffering, than if he had been able to lead his life as he might have chosen. A translator of many of his plays, wrote: "Havel had always been an opponent of Communist ideology, but by the time he was arrested in the late 1970s and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, he was the leader of a small but determined human rights movement, and had articulated a revolutionary form of non-violent opposition he called 'living in truth'...

Havel believed that when enough people acted in accordance with their conscience, the system would collapse. And he was right." The result was that while in his two terms Havel was only fitfully convincing as a politician, he carried unique authority as a moral figure. As such he was one of the few Europeans able to pronounce on the moral dimension of politics with the same sort of conviction as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi. He had been deprived of freedom for long enough to know its value.

As Communism crumbled, he told his compatriots: "We have become morally ill because we are used to saying one thing and thinking another... We have learned not to believe in anything, not to care about one another. Love, friendship, mercy, humility and forgiveness lost their depth and dimension."

The man who became the hero and embodiment of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989, brought his dramatist's flair to the office of the head of state: he replaced the dreary socialist realist paintings with landscapes by Czech masters, brought in a psychedelic painter to redecorate his study, and as his assistant hired a red-headed actress called Barbara Stepanova, "a busty hippie in a skin-tight purple minidress with filigreed white stockings", according to Vanity Fair.

He gave the rock musician Frank Zappa, one of his heroes, an honorary post in the Ministry of Culture and had new uniforms for the presidential guard designed by the costume designer on Milos Forman's film Amadeus. When they arrived, according to Vanity Fair, he put one on, brandished a sword and said: "Let's go scare the cooks!"

But if that makes his spell in power sound like the lunatics taking over the asylum, or the arrival of the Yippies in the White House, half a lifetime under the boot of the Stalinists ensured a far more somber underpinning to both his work and his politics. It is impossible to imagine Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett being called to high office, but the sudden ascent of Havel – who idolized those blackly comic modernists, and whose plays are full of echoes of their work – was scarcely less improbable.

Having worked in the theatre all his life, he confessed to feeling extreme reluctance at the prospect of becoming president. "I hesitated until the last minute," he revealed in his memoirs, entitled ‘To the Castle and Back.’ "I had only a few hours to make a decision that would fundamentally change my life."

It was, he said, "the one genuine watershed in my life... You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have a chance to do it better, refuse to go near it". According to his friend Milos Forman, the two dominant traits in his character were shyness and courage, "both very extreme". Fortunately for his country it was the courage that won out.

As president he soon found himself at odds with his colleague Vaclav Klaus and the whole get-rich-quick culture that infested the new Czechoslovakia. He railed against the widespread hostility to gypsies, deplored but was unable to halt the separation of the Czech Republic from Slovakia and apologized for the expulsion of Sudeten Germans after World War Two. Despite declining popularity he was voted in for a second presidential term, serving until 2003.

In his first presidential address in 1990, he spelled out the code by which he intended to rule. "Let us teach ourselves that politics can be not just the art of the possible," he said, "... but ... the art of the impossible, namely the art of improving ourselves and the world." It was the challenge for which he will be remembered.

The revelation of Havel’s leadership wasn’t just the triumphant nonviolence of the Velvet Revolution – it was his bracing honesty, which was itself a revelation. Read the opening lines of his first inaugural address to the Czech people: “My dear fellow citizens … I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”

This is the hallmark of Havel’s writing – challenges to power rooted not in imperious ideological rhetoric but harder-to-dismiss, human-size truths.

Take a look at his most enduring essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” written behind the Iron Curtain in the darkest days of the 1970s and so recently referenced by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his own seminal speech at the 2026 Davos World Economic Conference.

In this classic call for everyday citizens to recognize their power to change their world, Havel uses the example of a Soviet-era grocer placing a state-sponsored sign in his store window with the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!”

“If the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth,” Havel wrote.

So why does he do it? “The sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology,” Havel wrote. “Ideology offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”

The power of those words ultimately helped inspire a revolution of citizen resistance to the totalitarian state. It may yet inspire more uprisings – because beneath his appeal is not a vision of a utopian alternative, but the more basic human-scale virtue of civic responsibility, both for yourself and future generations. Havel’s experience with the Nazis and Communists taught him the lesson that utopian dreams often end in nightmares.

Consequently, Havel has cautionary words for the overheated acolytes of perpetual revolution and retribution. “Violence is well-known to breed violence, which is why most revolutions have degenerated into dictatorships, devouring their own offspring,” he wrote, “not knowing that they were digging their own graves and confining society in a vicious circle of revolutions and counter-revolutions.”

There is this enduring wisdom as well: Havel’s vision of an anti-totalitarian state ended up looking a lot like liberal capitalist democracy, with an emphasis on preserving pluralism and the uniqueness of a community.

Havel was not allergic to the responsibilities of self-government but instead embraced the mantle of authority in his own quixotic manner, never pretending to be perfect, leading by the power of his example rather than the example of his power.

In office, he was a clear voice arguing for the West’s efforts to intervene militarily to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. At a time when many nations seemed confused, unable to see the conflict with moral clarity, Havel helped keep the Western world focused on our commitment to “never forget.”

Retired from public life and often wrestling ill-health, Havel continued to write. Because he was one of the few recent world leaders who was primarily an author and artist, it is probably best to let his words speak for themselves on a few more varied subjects.

– On purposeful politics: “True politics, worthy of the name — and the only kind I will practice — is the politics of service to one’s neighbor. Service to the community; service to those who will succeed us … If you are modest and do not lust after power, not only are you suited to politics, you absolutely belong there.”

– On globalization: “An amalgamation of cultures is taking place. … We are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.”

– On hope and persistence: “The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.”'

– On a keeping a sense of humor: “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”

If you’re inspired to learn more about Vaclav Havel, pick up one of his many books, from collections like “Open Letters” to interview collections like “Disturbing the Peace” to ruminations and recollections in books like “Summer Meditations” and “To the Castle and Back.”

In an uncertain, always evolving world, I am certain of this: Vaclav Havel’s words and example will endure and continue to provide inspiration, lighting a path forward, reminding us that history takes place in the here and now and that we all contribute to making it.

One thing is clear. His life story is so improbable that can be sure of one thing: if he can go from prison to the presidency; if a writer can prove that the pen is mightier than the sword and that words can change the world, than anyone can.      

We can all be heroes.