People of the Revolution and the USSR

Dissident 1901–1950 ✕ Executed

Czech politician who resisted both the Nazis and the Communists and was hanged in 1950 after a fabricated treason trial

A women’s rights activist and anti-Nazi resistance member, Horáková served in parliament after the war and resigned in 1948. Arrested in 1949, she was sentenced to death in a fabricated treason trial and hanged in 1950.

A Prague lawyer, she was prominent in the interwar women’s rights movement. Active in the underground resistance under German occupation, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940, passed through Terezín and German prisons and was freed by American troops in April 1945. After the war she became a National Socialist deputy and in 1947 founded the women’s magazine Vlasta. She resigned her seat in protest shortly after the February 1948 coup but chose not to emigrate and stayed politically active in Prague. Arrested in September 1949 and interrogated under torture, she was sentenced to death for conspiracy and treason and hanged in Pankrác prison on 27 June 1950.

Dissident 1936–2011 ○ Natural causes

Czech playwright-turned-president whose absurdist theater critiqued the regime and whose dissident leadership ended communist rule

In February 1969, Havel published 'Český úděl?' in the journal Tvář, rebutting Kundera's lyrical nationalism: 'I do not believe in this fate… first and foremost we ourselves are the masters of our fate.'

Czech playwright, dissident, and statesman. His absurdist plays The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965) won international acclaim for their satire of the Communist system. After the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968, he answered Milan Kundera's 'Český úděl' with 'Český úděl?', arguing the reforms had merely restored freedoms that existed thirty years earlier, and turned fully to dissident politics. He co-founded Charter 77, endured nearly four years in prison (1979–1983), led the Civic Forum in the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic.

Dissident 1948–1969 ✕ Self-immolation

The Charles University student who set himself on fire against the Soviet occupation

On his deathbed, Palach told doctors and fellow students: 'My deed has fulfilled its goal.' He urged others never to repeat his act but to fight alive.

On 16 January 1969, five months into the Warsaw Pact occupation, Charles University student Jan Palach set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square to rouse Czechoslovak society from growing resignation. His letter demanded abolition of censorship and a ban on Zprávy, the Soviet occupation newspaper, and he signed it 'Torch Number One'; he died of his burns three days later. His funeral drew 200,000 people, the last mass expression of the reform spirit before normalization, and twenty years later, the protests marking his death helped ignite the Velvet Revolution.