On December 18, 2011, the country's former president Vaclav Havel died in the Czech Republic at the age of 75.
An icon of the anti-communist dissident movement and a symbol of democratic revival in Eastern Europe, he was the embodiment of the Gentle Revolution of 1989, which peacefully overthrew the totalitarian regime in Prague.
Vaclav Havel was born on October 5, 1936 in Prague, into a family that owned film studios and dozens of buildings in the capital. He was deprived of the right to study as part of the campaign to fight the bourgeoisie conducted by the communist regime. So he devoted himself to the theater in 1955 - first as a stage machinist, then as an author of absurdist plays.
He gained recognition in the mid-1960s, but the Soviet occupation of the country in 1968 brought him into dissident circles. Havel became one of the authors of "Charter-77" - a manifesto of the opposition to the communist regime in defense of human rights, signed by the country's most prominent dissidents. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison and wrote the famous "Letters to Olga", his first wife, while behind bars. At the same time, the communist authorities in Czechoslovakia banned some of his works.
In the fall of 1989, he headed the "Civil Forum" - the organization that coordinated the Gentle Revolution in Czechoslovakia. He became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992, and then the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.
After the death of his wife Olga in 1996, he quickly remarried to actress Dagmar Veškernová, twenty years his junior.
After his retirement from power, despite his frail health, he devoted himself to the fight for human rights in Cuba, Belarus, Myanmar and Russia.
He also returned to writing: in 2006 he published his political memoirs, and two years later a play - "To Leave".
Václav Havel's health was already shaken during the five years spent in communist prisons, the years of heavy smoking also took their toll. He narrowly escaped death more than once. In December 1996, he underwent surgery for cancer of the right lung, in April 1998, surgeons in Austria saved him at the last moment from intestinal perforation, and the following August he suffered a heart attack.
On March 8, 2011, Havel was again admitted to a Prague hospital with severe lung problems - two weeks before the premiere of the film "To Leave" based on his play. After that, he retired to his villa, where he disappeared from the world.