Czech playwright, author, poet, dissident, and politician Václav Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and then as the first president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003).

The Communist Party’s leadership resigned on November 28 and an anti-communist government was in power by December 10. Václav Havel, a writer and the nation’s most famous dissident, was elected president on December 29, becoming the last president of Czechoslovakia.

Václav Havel, the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic; a playwright whose belief that “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred" put him at odds with the iron-fisted Communist regime that ruled his country for most of his life; whose insistence on “living in truth,” or going about one’s daily life as if the regime did not exist, helped bring about the nonviolent "Velvet Revolution" that ended four decades of repression, died in his sleep on December 18th.