Dear Mr. President, dear Senators and Members of the House, ladies and gentlemen:
My advisers advised me to speak on this important occasion in Czech. I don’t know why. Perhaps they wanted you to enjoy the sweet sounds of my mother tongue.
The last time they arrested me, on October 27 of last year, I didn’t know whether it was for two days or two years.
Exactly one month later, when the rock musician Michael Kocab told me that I would be probably proposed as a presidential candidate, I thought it was one of his usual jokes.
On the 10th of December, 1989, when my actor friend, Jiri Bartoska, in the name of the Civic Forum, nominated me as a candidate for the office of president of the republic, I thought it was out of the question that the parliament we have inherited from the previous regime would elect me.
Nineteen days later, when I was unanimously elected president of my country, I had no idea that, in two months, I would be speaking in front of this famous and powerful assembly and that what I say would be heard by millions of people who have never heard of me and that hundreds of politicians and political scientists would study every word that I say.
When they arrested me on October 27, I was living in a country ruled by the most conservative communist government in Europe, and our society slumbered beneath the pall of a totalitarian system.
Today, less than four months later, I’m speaking to you as the representative of a country that has set out on the road to democracy, a country where there is complete freedom of speech, which is getting ready for free elections and which wants to create a prosperous market economy and its own foreign policy…
My favourite speech: Vaclav Havel’s address to the US Congress, 21 February 1990
29 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in politics Tags: fall of communism, unanticipated revolutions
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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