Peace movements sometimes fail to address the plight of those suffering repression and dictatorship. During the cold war human rights campaigners in the East were often skeptical and even resentful of Western peace movements for overlooking the brutal realities of Soviet totalitarianism. Without guarantees of political freedom, they argued, peace is impossible. For many in the East the very word peace was tainted. The Kremlin's propagandistic manipulation of the term and its creation of communist front peace councils gave the word a foul connotation. The concept came to mean not the peace of a free people, but the enforced order of a police state, the peace of the grave. When Václav Havel, the playwright and future Czech president, was invited by Western activists to attend an international disarmament conference in 1985, he declined. He explained his reticence by emphasizing that the danger of war was caused not by weapons, but by the underlying political tensions and mistrust that arose from the suppression of freedom: