Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident who led his country's Velvet Revolution against communism before becoming its president and, later, a global campaigner for human rights, political freedom and the environment, died Sunday. He was 75 years old.
Jailed twice for his antigovernment activism in the 1970s and 1980s by then-Czechoslovakia's leaders, Mr. Havel became the face of the opposition in 1989, helping turn a student uprising into the endgame for the country's Soviet-backed regime. He was elected president by parliament that December.
"He put this country back on the map of the democratic world," said the Czech Republic's current prime minister, Petr Necas, who described him Sunday as the most important Czech politician of the country's post-Communist era.
A soft-spoken and pensive man, Mr. Havel was twice elected president of the Czech Republic after it separated from Slovakia in the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, and he oversaw his country's transition to democracy and its reintegration with the West.
Though Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain until 1989, Mr. Havel 10 years later led the Czech Republic into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He also laid the ground work for the Czech Republic's 2004 accession to the European Union. He left office in 2003.
The former president, once a heavy smoker, had lung-cancer surgery in 1996 and was prone to respiratory illnesses. He spent his last moments in the company of his wife, Dagmar Havlova, and a Catholic nun, according to his secretary, Sabina Tancevova, in a statement. She didn't disclose a cause of death.
Mr. Havel met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, a personal friend who was visiting Prague, a week ago. In televised images of the pair, Mr. Havel appeared frail. The Dalai Lama said he offered Mr. Havel Tibetan medicine and had counseled rest.
Mr. Havel's embrace of the Dalai Lama and the cause of human rights in China angered the government in Beijing. But the former Czech president didn't shy away from using his bully pulpit to campaign for greater political freedom around the world from Belarus to Burma, now known as Myanmar.
Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland's anticommunist Solidarity movement and later democratically elected president of Poland, said Sunday that Mr. Havel was a political philosopher who "fought with his word and pen."
Vaclav Havel was born into a wealthy Czech family in 1936. After the Communist putsch in 1948, family holdings, including construction companies, real estate and the Prague Barrandov film studios, were seized by the authorities. As a son of the bourgeoisie, Mr. Havel was relegated to the status of second-class citizen.
In the 1960s, during a temporary thaw in political control, Mr. Havel staged his first plays and worked as a magazine editor. But in 1968 with the greater openness of the Prague Spring threatening the Communists' hold on power, Soviet-led troops invaded and ushered in a return to a harder line.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the government sent Mr. Havel to work at a small regional brewery.
In 1977, he led a group of dissidents that drafted and published an open letter criticizing the Communist leadership. Known as Charter 77, the letter spawned an eponymous antigovernment movement.
Despite being jailed twice by the Communists, Mr. Havel presided over a peaceful transition that lacked the sort of bloody retribution that struck in Romania. But Mr. Havel's light touch earned him criticism from some other anticommunists, who had taken up arms against the regime in the 1950s.
They blamed Mr. Havel for being too lenient during the Velvet Revolution, when he allowed the Communists to regroup under a new name. The party has held seats in all democratic Czech parliaments since 1990.
Since leaving office in 2003, Mr. Havel focused much of his energy on organizing annual gatherings in Prague of former and active politicians to debate the most pressing problems facing the world and to lambaste totalitarian regimes. The gatherings became known as the Forum 2000.
In November 2007 he published "Leaving," his first play since 1988. It turned out to be his last. A movie version of the play, which he directed, premiered in March.
The play—said to be inspired by Shakespeare's "King Lear" and Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard"—is about a former ruling politician who grapples with changes around him after he leaves his office.
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