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Gustáv Husák Biography

Gustáv Husák

(Dubravka, 1913-Bratislava, 1991) Czechoslovak politician who was general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the KSC (1968-1988) and president of the Czechoslovak Republic (1975-1989).Educated in Bratislava, he received a law degree from the Comenius University in Bratislava in 1937, when he began practicing as a lawyer.In 1932, while doing his degree, he joined the Czech Communist Party.

In 1942, in the middle of World War II, Húsak became the leader of those communists who remained in the country after the Nazi invasion, and he was working full time for the party in hiding.A key figure in the anti-Nazi Slovak insurrection of 1944, he quickly rose within the party, which earned him, after the end of the war, being appointed president of the Council of Commissars (Slovak provincial government), between the years 1946 to 1951, and Minister of Agriculture, from 1948 to 1949.He was also a member of the Presidium of the KSC.During all this time, Húsak made a notable effort to match and synthesize the basic ideology of international communism with Czechoslovak patriotism.

After the Prague coup of 1948, which placed the orthodox communist Klement Gottwald in the absolute power of the country, Húsak's political task ran into serious difficulties until the bloody Stalinist political purges decreed by Gottwald at the beginning of the 1950s finally defenested him.On May 4, 1950, Húsak was removed from all positions and political responsibilities and on February 6, 1951, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, expelled from the party and imprisoned, accused of being a "bourgeois nationalist" and of acting in collusion with the capitalist powers.Westerners.

During his long captivity, Húsak wrote a work on the Slovak insurrection of 1944.Thanks to a general amnesty decreed in 1960, Húsak was able to regain his freedom and, three years later, be politically rehabilitated or, in other words, re-enter the KSC and see himself again with his seat in the Czech National Assembly.Húsak worked at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and actively participated in different committees, at the same time that he proclaimed himself in favor of starting a movement within Czech communism to democratize political and economic structures.

The neglect of the Czech president, the Stalinist Antonin Novotny, regarding the problems of the Slavic population, caused him to progressively lose the support of the Slovak communists, who conspired to replace him by their leader Alexander Dubcek in January 1968, who proposed to carry out a series of political reforms as the only way out to keep the KSC in power.Dubcek appointed his friend Húsak deputy prime minister in April of the same year.

Both leaders undertook the transformation of the country in April, known as the Prague Spring, whose main objective was to create a "socialism with a human face." But the Czech reforms came to a halt when, on August 20 of the same year, the Soviet leader Brezhnev decreed the invasion of the country by military forces belonging to the Warsaw Pact, without the Czech Army and the civilian population putting up any resistance.

Húsak was one of the members of the Czech delegation that negotiated in Moscow the withdrawal of the invading troops.Showing a practical and realistic political sense, after coldly analyzing the situation in which his country found itself after the invasion, Húsak concluded that the survival of Czechoslovakia at that time required forced but honorable cooperation with the USSR., which made it clear that it was not willing to allow any fickleness on the part of the members of the Warsaw Pact.Thus, in April 1969, after Dubcek was removed from all his posts, Húsak was appointed with the acquiescence of Moscow as Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak Republic and Secretary General of the KSC.

The Government of Húsak, within the orthodox lines marked by Moscow in all fields (economic, political and ideological), broke all hopes of change harbored during the tragic events of the Prague spring.Due to his realistic policy, based on the conviction of the need to gain the confidence of the Kremlin, it even induced him to violently repress the anti-Soviet demonstrations of 1969, commemorating the first anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and to carry out a purge.violent against all dissidents, including the ousted Dubcek, his old friend, who was expelled from the KSC Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1971, Húsak was confirmed in the position of secretary general of the KSC, and in May 1975 president of the Czechoslovak Republic, a position for which he was successively reelected in the years 1980 and 1985.

A former dissident of Stalinism, Húsak introduced a series of timid reforms aimed at decentralizing the Czech economy, but always without abandoning and bearing in mind the dictates coming from the Kremlin, to the point of vehemently resisting the reformist policy undertaken by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as of 1985.The high hierarchies of the KSC shared the same opinion, so, due to his advanced age, Húsak was replaced as secretary general, in December 1987, by the younger and even more radical and orthodox, Milos Jakes.

In 1989, when the Czech regime was left unprotected in Moscow, the democratization process became unstoppable.On December 10, 1989, Húsak resigned as president of the Czechoslovak Republic and retired from active politics, while the renewing faction of the party forced Milos Jakes to do the same as secretary general of the party, being replaced by the reformist Václav Havel.In February 1990, shortly before his death, Húsak was expelled from the KSC.

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