Ludvik Vaculik, a leading Czech writer, dissident and intellectual, whose calls for human rights and trenchant critique of Communism helped foster a short-lived period of freedom that culminated in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, has died. He was 88.

The Czech news media announced his death on June 6 but did not say when or where he had died or provide the cause.

Mr. Vaculik was a key figure in the Czechoslovak underground publishing world in the 1970s and ’80s, helping to give voice to other dissident writers in the country who were banned by the government. He himself was censored for more than two decades but still managed to write a series of influential articles, books and novels, including “The Guinea Pigs” (1970), “The Czech Dreambook” (1980) and “A Cup of Coffee With My Interrogator” (1987), which used humor and a developed sense of the absurd to distill the struggles of living under despotic circumstances.

Perhaps most notable among Mr. Vaculik’s achievements was a concise and eloquent political manifesto in 1968 called “Two Thousand Words,” in which he critiqued the moral, economic and political decay wrought by the Communist state and called for an expansion of democracy and human rights.