I have only been to Prague twice. The first time was in 1974 and the second time in 1998 (both dates are approximate). In 1974, Prague was one of the saddest looking cities I ever had seen. Everything was gray. Everyone building looked like it needed attention. Every passerby was looking down and looking morose. There were few shops open that I saw. The restaurants were depressing. Even the skies were gray.

In 1998, gray Prague had come to life. Not only did every building look like it had just received a new coat of paint. Not only did everyone seem to be in love with life. Not only were there too many tourists sites to see, as well as too many tourists. Prague itself looked less like a normal city than like an inhabited Disneyland.

The transformation had been complete. That was then; this is now. How did it happen?

I can’t say that I understand it well, but I understand the transformation better than I did, say, a week ago, when I had not yet read Michael Zantovsky’s book Havel, a Life, published in 2014. I found a nice copy of the book, signed by the author, at Lost City Books in Adams Morgan, where I had not been in years. Zanatovsky was, for a short while, Vaclav Havel’s press secretary when Havel was the Czech president, and then, as a Czech diplomat, was Ambassador to the United Kingdom, to Israel and to the United States. He is also a scholar and translator and now very active with the Aspen Institute.

It takes a commitment to read a 500 pages biography of Havel, but he is worth the time. I am not going to recite his life story. Only enough to give you some background you may not already know.

Vaclav Havel was born in 1936 in the Republic of Czechoslovakia, a country carved out of part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at Versailles after World War I, and a country doomed to be dismembered first as a result of the agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich, and then by the Nazis ignoring the agreement reached in Munich altogether and marching in and taking over the entire country. Havel came from a wealthy family. His father was a factory owner; his father’s brother was a leader (I think maybe THE leader) in Czech film production. Under German rule, his family lost everything.

His family was patriotic and anti-Nazi. Havel became well educated; he was an intellectual. He became a playwright and well known in avant-garde circles. In my mind, he was the inheritor of the senses of humor, satire and anarchy of another famous resident of Prague, one Franz Kafka. Havel’s dramatic works were, from the descriptions given in Zantovsky’s book, clever, sharp, biting, but all had to be done with an eye to the Communist society that enveloped Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II, starting in the mid to late 1940s.

Although he was not one of the leaders of the 1968 Prague Spring Czech revolt, he was one of the premiere dramatists and essayists of the time, well known in academic and popular circles. And of course, the march of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the revolt, curb the intellectuals, and clamp down on any sense of personal individualism both affected Havel deeply, and explains the Prague I saw in 1974.

In 1977, Havel was one of the leaders of the group behind, and one of the signers of, Charter 77, an attempt to open up Czech society to more freedom of thought and expression. He was probably the most visible of the Charter 77 activists, visible enough to be thrown into prison for four years in 1979.

When he was released from prison, he lay low. But after the next Czech revolt, the Velvet Revolution, which spelled the end of Soviet influence in Czechoslovakia in 1988, Havel found himself chosen as the first president of the post-Communist country.

Now things will start to seem more familiar. Havel was clearly what we would call politically liberal. His name was known world wide both for his intellectual accomplishment and now his political position, and he traveled world wide. He was a globalist in that he was one of the first to work to get Czechoslovakia allied with the west, both through EU and NATO membership. This was quite a task, as there were those in his country who were tired of foreign alliances, those who felt Russia would be provoked, and those who felt Czechoslovakia would be called on to participate in conflicts they would otherwise avoid. But he carried the day, as he did on many domestic reforms.

But things weren’t completely smooth for several reasons. The biggest was that longstanding disagreements and jealousies between Czechs and Slovaks led to a split of the country during Havel’s presidency. Yes, Havel the peacemaker and globalist could not keep his country in one piece. And within the Czech Republic itself, there were continual battles between legislators and the executive. All of this took its toll on Havel, physically and emotionally.

Digression: Can you tell the difference between a Czech and a Slovak? Did you know that these groups apparently never really liked each other, and that there was a feeling when Czechoslovakia was created after World War I that it was a bad marriage of two different peoples? Did you know that Slovaks were often looked down upon by Czechs? That Slovaks were much less happy with the end of Communism than Czechs? That the capitalistic transformation of the country hurt the Slovak economy and helped the Czech economy? That when the country was still together, there was concern that some agencies were overly-Czech? That for a short while, the two parts of the country had two different parliaments, with the overall president often caught in the middle? I didn’t. And, by the way, if a Czech and a Slovak marry and have a child, what is that child anyway?

Digression number two: The Czech Republic? Czechia? What is it anyway?

The book also talks about Havel’s long marriage to his wife, Olga, and that they seemed to have a somewhat open marriage, permitting dalliances here and there on both sides, and his second marriage to a younger and ambitious actress after Olga’s death. And, even more than his private life, Zantovsky talks about Havel’s health, which was never good, but which got appreciably worse after he left the presidency in 2003. He was a smoker, developed lung cancer, which was successfully operated on but weakened his lung capacity. He was in an out of hospitals, and suffered greatly from depression, and the thought that he had failed in everything he ever tried to do.

If you are interested in looking at Czechoslovakia as an example of how a country coped with the collapse of Communism, and are interested in how Havel, a talented playwright became a charismatic, respected, and in many ways successful president, dealing with a substantial amount of transitional internal chaos, you may want to read this book. I don’t think you will remember most of the details, but you will certainly see the big picture, and appreciate the difficulties changing all social norms in an ongoing society.

Now that I have finished reading Havel, a Life, I have started on a book with a related theme, The Invention of Russia, written by Arkady Ostrovsky. I have read the long first chapter, which deals with the thinking going on in the minds of various elite Communist leaders in Russia, as to how to deal with changes that might need to be made after Stalin’s death, how all prospective modifications were met with internal objections, and how this back and forth led to the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union. More on this to come.