Guajara in other languages: Spanish, Deutsch, French, Italian ...


Gustáv Husák

Gustáv Husák (January 10, 1913 Dúbravka (today part of Bratislava) - November 18, 1991 Bratislava) was a Slovak politician, a long-term Communist leader of Czechoslovakia and of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. His rule is known as the period of Normalization.

Table of contents
1 Life
2 Functions
3 Other important data:

Life

As a son of a jobless worker near Bratislava, he quickly became a Communist. In 1933, when he started his studies, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC), which was prohibited from 1938 to 1945. During World War II he was periodically jailed by the Jozef Tiso government for illegal Communist activities, and he was one of the leaders of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising against Nazi Germany and Tiso.

After the war he began a career as a government official in Slovakia and party functionary in Czechoslovakia. From 1946 - 1950, he was a kind of quasi Prime Minister of Slovakia, and as such he strongly contributed to the liquidation of the Democratic Party of Slovakia, which had won 62% in the 1946 elections in Slovakia, thus preventing the Communists from seizing power in Czechoslovakia.

In 1950 he fell victim to a Stalinist purge of the party leadership, and was sentenced for life, spending the years from 1954 to 1960 in prison. As a result of the De-Stalinization period in Czechoslovakia, his conviction was overturned and his party membership restored in 1963. By 1967 he was attacking the KSC's neo-Stalinist leadership, and he became a deputy premier of Czechoslovakia in April 1968, during the period of liberalization under party leader Alexander Dubcek.

As the Soviet Union grew increasingly alarmed by Dubcek's liberal reforms in 1968 (Prague Spring), Husák began calling for caution. After the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia in August and he had participated in the Czechoslovak-Soviet negotiations between the kidnapped Alexander Dubcek and Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, he suddenly became a leader of those party members calling for the reversal of Dubcek's reforms. This change becomes understandable if we consider that he had been in prison for six years of his life, he was a highly intelligent and pragmatic person, and if we look at one of his official speeches in Slovakia after the 1968 events, during which he ventured the rhetorical question, where his opponents (i. e. supporters of opposition against the Soviet Union) want to find those "friends" of Czechoslovakia (i. e. countries in Europe) that would come to support the country (i. e. against Soviet troops).

Supported by Moscow, he was appointed leader of the Communist Party of Slovakia in as early as August 1968, and he succeeded Dubcek as first secretary (title changed to general secretary in 1971) of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in April 1969. He reversed Dubcek's reforms and purged the party of its liberal members in 1969 - 1971. He yielded his post as general secretary in 1987, when younger members of the Communist party wanted to participate in the power (Milos Jakes, Ladislav Adamec). Communist rule collapsed in Czechoslovakia in late 1989, and that December Husák resigned as president. In February 1990 he was expelled from the Communist Party.

Functions

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia/KSC (prohibited 1938, dissolved 1939-1945) Communist Party of Slovakia/KSS (illegal 1939-1944/1945) Slovak National Council (during WWII a resistance parliament-government, since 1968 the Slovak parliament) Council of Commissioners (Zbor povereníkov) (a quasi government responsible for Slovakia) Czechoslovak Parliament (called National Assembly and since 1968 Federal Assembly) Czechoslovak government President of Czechoslovakia

Other important data:

See also:



Wikipedia - All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Tagoror dot com  -  Legal Information  -  Contact us