The theatre break-in was one of Prague’s winter scandals, never properly resolved by the communist police. Two young men broke into a theatre basement, snatched a large mirror and smashed it to pieces.
It was December 1963. One of the burglars was Vàclav Havel, a witty and ambitious playwright preparing for the premiere of his first play, The Garden Party, a drama of intrigue and word games mocking the absurdity of the communist regime.
The mirror was the centrepiece of the stage design for the Havel play at the Balustrade Theatre. He hated the mirror, but the stage designer wouldn’t listen. So the future revolutionary leader launched his career of radical activism.
”It just shows how determined he is,” says Pavel Landovsky, a long-standing intimate of Havel. ”This is not a man of compromise. The play itself was an act of heroism, risking everything. It’s theatre of the absurd, but here the absurd was much more dangerous than in the West.”
Forty years later, after an extraordinary career as a stagehand, dramatist, convict, poet, brewery worker, revolutionary and president, Havel has stepped down as head of state of the Czech Republic.
His departure at the age of 66 marks the end of an era for post-communist Eastern Europe. As he shuffles off to rest in his villa on Portugal’s Atlantic coast, Havel leaves a vacuum behind, not only at home but also internationally.
In a world run according to the brutal dictates of George W Bush, Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, Havel has been, and remains, a beacon of reason, decency, firmness and principle.
”He gave us Czechs a better status in the world than we deserved,” says Deputy Foreign Minister Alexandr Vondra, an architect of the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
Havel led that revolution and is the only leader of the great upheavals of 1989 to have remained in power, serving four terms, first as the president of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic.
Of the great human rights heroes of the late 1980s, Havel alone has lasted the pace in office. That record testifies to his tenacity and talent for day-to-day politics, despite appearing to be above the fray.
One measure of his achievement is the two international summits held under his auspices in Prague, bracketing his 13 years in power. In 1990 the last summit of the Warsaw Pact in Prague dissolved the Kremlin’s control of Eastern Europe; and two months ago, Nato’s first summit on the other side of the old iron curtain cemented Eastern Europe’s integration with the West.
”Had it not been for Havel, our joining Nato and the European Union would not have been so quick,” says Jan Ruml, an old dissident colleague who is the Vice-President of the Czech Senate. ”But Havel’s not a god. He’s not irreplaceable.”
The Czechs, however, are finding it tough replacing their philosopher-president. Six attempts in the past couple of weeks to elect his successor have resulted in stalemate and fiasco.
Havel’s departure is being marked in Prague with bittersweet melancholy, parties and gala performances at the National Theatre. The unusual neon light suspended over the 10th-century Prague Castle, the presidential seat, was to be switched off on February 2. For the past two months the Prague night sky has been illuminated by the large, pink, neon heart that is the president’s signature seal. The light is pure Havel: witty, ironic, theatrical and sincere all at the same time.
The memorable gesture recalls the heady early days of his rule when it seemed as if John Lennon had become the head of state and that the hippy generation had seized power. ”Love and truth will prevail” was the slogan that escorted him into office.
Pranksters whizzed through the draughty castle corridors on children’s scooters; the deadening communist decor was stripped and replaced by radical interior design.
But despite the frivolity, the heavy drinking and chain-smoking of the time, Havel is serious and reflective, and intensely political in a non-party way.
Like Nelson Mandela, Havel is the moral reference point for the politics of an entire region — a status earned by his years of battle with the communists, which left his health in ruins, and by his judicious exercise of power when he won it. But like another contemporary giant, Mikhail Gorbachev, he is more fêted abroad than at home.
Foreign policy triumphs have been clouded by domestic defeats, the biggest being the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992/93, a divorce fiercely opposed by the president.
People took umbrage at his marrying his mistress, Dagmar Veskrnova, within a year of the death of the first lady, Olga Havlova. And ordinary Czechs saw him as too patrician and out of touch.
If mistakes were made, it was not for lack of planning. Havel is an obsessive organiser and stickler for detail in his writings, in his politics and in his personal life. He writes all his speeches himself.
”He has an uncanny ability with language, analysing sentences and words,” says Jiri Pehe, Havel’s former political adviser. ”Indeed, he has never stopped being a playwright.”
That observation is confirmed by the drama of 1989. Vondra came out of a communist jail on November 10, the day after the Berlin Wall fell, and immediately repaired to Havel’s country cottage near the Polish border.
With Vondra and two others, the future president sat down for 10 hours and plotted the coming revolution in painstaking detail: what demonstration would take place when, who would speak at what point, which singer would sing what song at what time.
”He scripted the lot down to the last detail, like a screenplay. He’s a perfectionist,” Vondra recalls.
The long struggle against totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, best exemplified by Havel’s life, lends his statements a simple authority that would appear suspect coming from others.
He was a proud warmonger on Slobodan Milosevic. He bravely pilloried his own people for the ethnic cleansing of Germans at the end of World War II. And he does not shrink from starkly describing Saddam Hussein as ”evil”.
”Human life, human liberty and human dignity represent higher values than state sovereignty,” he told the Nato summit. Military intervention is right if such an action ”would really be an act helping people against a criminal regime and protecting humanity”.
A couple of months earlier Havel told a New York audience: ”Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.”
But such moral certitude is complicated by his self-doubt and growing pessimism about the world. ”He is a doubting man. He has a lot of doubts when talking to his friends. But when a decision is taken, he publicly banishes the doubts and shows leadership,” says Vondra.
His 13 years of presidency, Havel said in New York, have been ”a magnificent gift of destiny”. But as he bows out, he feels that ”the very same restlessness that once compelled me to stand up against the totalitarian regime and go to jail for it is now causing me to have such deep doubts about the value of my own work.
”Every day I suffer more and more from stage fright.” — Â