'Living in Truth': A Tribute to Vaclav Havel

A great world citizen died Sunday: Vaclav Havel, the former dissident turned President of the Czech Republic.  Anne Applebaum, one of the best foreign policy columnists with the Washington Post, wrote a wonderful tribute to Havel, which also sums up what we can learn from this distinguished life.

Vaclav Havel

First and foremost, Havel not only opposed the communist regime, he also articulated a theory of opposition. His plays — as turgid, alas, as the communist bureaucrats they are meant to satirize — will not survive, except as curiosities. But his famous political essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” will live forever. The appeal of “The Power of the Powerless” is universal. I have given Havel’s essay to Iranian friends, and I once discussed it with would-be dissidents in pre-revolutionary Tunis. In both places, it seemed — seems — relevant.

In this essay, Havel didn’t talk about marches or demonstrations. Instead, he asked the inhabitants of totalitarian countries to “live in truth”: that is, to go about their daily lives as if the regime did not exist, to the extent that was possible in societies where the state ran all businesses and all schools, owned most of the property and banned free speech and free press. By the late 1980s, “living in truth” was widely practiced across central Europe. The first time I went to Poland in 1987, I stayed with friends. According to the law, I was supposed to register my presence in a private home with the police. “We don’t do that,” my friends told me. “We don’t believe the police have the right to know who stays with us.” I didn’t register — and because thousands of other people didn’t either, that law became unenforceable.

But Havel proposed more than mere civil disobedience. He also argued in favor of what we would now call civil society, urging the inhabitants of totalitarian states to found small institutions — musical groups, sporting groups, literary groups — that would develop the “independent life of society” and prevent their members from being totally controlled from above. This, too, was widely practiced, in Prague’s famous underground philosophy seminars, in the illegal printing presses all across the communist world, in Poland’s independent “Flying University,” and, most successfully, in Poland’s independent trade unions.

Funeral Procession in Prague

Havel also practiced what he preached. But unlike many others, he did so not only before the fall of communism but also afterward. Upon being elected president, Havel stopped wearing blue jeans and started wearing suits. He moved his headquarters into Prague Castle, where he repainted the offices, took down the steel barriers and acquired a set of red, white and blue BMWs (the colors of the Czech flag) to use in his presidential cavalcade. He ceased to be a dissident. He stopped staying out all night at parties. His friends complained he was no fun anymore. This was his second great achievement: He became an establishment politician, and he created, anew, the institution of the Czech presidency.

Havel was different, in the end, from so many of his generation. Obsessed for so long with the tactics of destruction, few of them understood the importance of reconstruction. In fact, victory was not just toppling the old regime, victory was creating the institutions and symbols that would replace it. Because he was far-thinking enough to understand this, he will be mourned deeply and long remembered, across central Europe and beyond.