Since the time of Machiavelli, the image of a politician in the minds of society has been associated with hypocrisy, cruelty and unscrupulousness in the struggle for power and its preservation. The example of Vaclav Havel proves that a different type of person can be an authoritative politician - an intellectual who preaches moral resistance to evil and “life in truth.” A writer and playwright, Havel became the leader of a bloodless revolution, the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first independent Czech Republic. Following his hero’s formula “There is no life outside history and history outside life,” Ivan Belyaev wrote a biography of Havel, every event in whose life is intertwined with the cultural and political context of the entire 20th century. The Habsburg Empire will collapse before the reader's eyes; in the new Czechoslovak state, the hero’s father and uncle will build a “Czech Hollywood”, soon subjugated by Hitler; another 30 years later, Soviet troops would suppress the Prague Spring, and Vaclav Havel would become one of Eastern Europe's most famous dissidents. This approach allows the author not only to convey the scale of his hero’s personality, but also to show the process of disintegration of the totalitarian world under the influence of humanistic ethics, the bearer of which was Havel and his associates. Ivan Belyaev is a journalist for Radio Liberty.