Havel imprisoned

JAN 01 1979 · 12:00

Václav Havel, playwright and VONS co-founder. He served almost four years in Hermanice and Plzeň-Bory after the 1979 trial. Place: Ruzyně remand prison · Heřmanice labor camp, Ostrava · Plzeň-Bory prison Figures: Václav Havel, playwright · Petr Uhl, Otta Bednářová, Václav Benda, the VONS co-defendants · Olga Havlová, his wife, recipient of the letters In April 1978, Havel and ten others found VONS, the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, an offshoot of Charter 77 that publishes case-by-case reports of political arrests. By 1979 the committee has issued 156 reports. The regime, having tolerated Charter 77 as a symbolic abstraction, will not tolerate a registry of named victims. On 29 May 1979 the StB arrest ten VONS members. Six are tried that October. Havel, charged with subversion of the Republic, draws four and a half years. He has just finished the essay Moc bezmocných, the power of the powerless, written in late 1978 in expectation of arrest. The essay describes a greengrocer who hangs the sign workers of the world, unite in his window without thought; the act of describing it accurately, Havel argues, is already the act of refusing the system. It will circulate in samizdat and translation through the 1980s, the central dissident text of the period.