Václav Benda

Václav Benda (8 August 1946 – 2 June 1999) was a Czech Roman Catholic activist, intellectual and mathematician. Under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, Benda and his wife were rare in that they were devout Roman Catholics among the leadership of the anti-communist dissident organization Charter 77. After the Velvet Revolution, Benda became the head of an organization charged with investigating the former Czechoslovak secret police and their many informants.

The ideas expressed in Benda's iconic essay A Parallel Polis influenced the thought of other dissidents like Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa. In the 2010s and 2020s, American Paleoconservative writer Rod Dreher and Russian-American writer Masha Gessen have drawn on these events and ideas from Cold War-era eastern Europe in disparate works for popular audience. The first English translation of Benda's collected samizdat essays was published by St. Augustine's Press in 2017.