Visiting Prague

Summary: life and political influence of the president of Czechoslovakia during the period of Normalization.

Gustáv Husák was born in Dúbravka, Austria-Hungry, now Hungry, on the 10th of January, in the year of 1913, in a family with difficulties. When he was sixteen he joined the Communist Youth Union, he was still studying in the grammar school of Bratislava. Later, during his course in the Law Faculty of the Comenius University he entered the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), although he was banned from it from 1938 to 1945. During the events of the II World War he was imprisoned many times for illegal communist activates. Therefore he was a leader in the Slovak National Uprising in the year of 1944, against the Nazi Germany and Jozef Tiso.
When the II World War ended he was a government official in Slovakia and party functionary in Czechoslovakia. In 1946 the Democratic Party of Slovakia won the elections for 62% but Husák decided to liquidate the Party, preventing them to concentrate power in Czechoslovakia.
In 1954 he was arrested by Stalin in Leopoldov Prison, he was a communist since his early youth and therefore he wrote several letters to explain the misunderstanding. Although the president of Czechoslovakia Antonín Novotný, never exonerated him convincing his party colleges that they didn’t know what would Husák be capable of if he got to the power. However in 1963 during the period of De-Stalinization he was released and returned to the party. In 1973 he was against the neo-Stalinist wind of the party and in 1968, the period of liberalization, he become a deputy of Czechoslovakia.
After the Prague Spring, where Dubček’s liberal reforms were oppressed, he becomes a leader of those who wanted a change. With his pragmatism, after 1968 he supported the Soviet Union and condemned all of those who wanted to get out from behind the Iron Curtin.
The Soviet Union couldn’t find a better chief to rule the Czechoslovakia and made Husák the first secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia in 1968 and in the next year he was already the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. As expected he ended with the liberal politics of Dubček as well as with all the liberal members of the party. In 1975 he had become the president of the Czechoslovakia. He ruled the country for two decades being one of the most loyal allied. In the start of his mandate he provided a relatively satisfactory living standard and avoiding any overt reprisals. Although it was soon that repression started, especially by the secret police (StB) whose targets were the outspoken dissidents as well as hundreds of unknown persons who occurred to be objects of StB’s preventive strikes. In 1987 he yielded the general secretary of the party. The communism fall happened in 1989 with the Velvet Revolution. In 1990 he was expelled from the Communist Party once again. He died a year later.
He was never jugged by his orders that resulted in crimes concluded by the StB. Husák excused his moral responsibility saying he was just trying to make smaller the aftermaths of the Soviet invasion and had to constantly resist pressures of hard line Party Stalinists. There are many documents whish prove his contribution to the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia but Husák always tired to make it seem that things were learning toward “normality”.

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