Former Czech president Vaclav Havel dies aged 75

Havel was a former playwright who became a hero of the struggle to end the Cold War.

VACLAV HAVEL, THE dissident playwright who wove theater into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, has died. He was 75.

His assistant Sabina Dancecova says Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic.

Havel was his country’s first democratically elected president after the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” that ended four decades of repression by a regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan.”

As president, he oversaw the country’s bumpy transition to democracy and a free-market economy, as well its peaceful 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

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