Gustav Husak

Gustav Husak (born January 10, 1913, Bratislava, Slovakia, Austria-Hungary [now in Slovakia]—died November 18, 1991, Bratislava) was a Slovak Communist who was Czechoslovakia’s leader from 1969 to 1989.

Husak joined the Communist Party in Slovakia in 1933 while studying law at Comenius University in Bratislava, and after obtaining his law degree (1937) he worked as a lawyer while participating in underground Communist activities. During World War II he was jailed by Slovakia’s German-backed puppet government in 1940–43. After his release he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia, and he helped direct the antifascist Slovak national uprising of 1944.

After World War II Husak began a career as a government official and party functionary in Czechoslovakia. He was chairman of Slovakia’s governing body, the Board of Commissioners, from 1946 to 1950, but in the latter year he fell victim to a Stalinist purge of the Communist Party’s leadership, and he spent the years from 1954 to 1960 in prison. Upon his release he found a low-level government job in Bratislava. In 1963 his conviction was overturned and his membership in the Communist Party restored. By 1967 he was attacking the party’s neo-Stalinist leadership, and he became a deputy premier of Czechoslovakia in April 1968, during the period of liberalization under party leader Alexander Dubček. As the Soviet Union grew increasingly alarmed by Dubček’s liberal reforms, Husak began calling for caution, and, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August, Husak became a leader of those party members calling for the reversal of Dubček’s reforms. He was appointed leader of the Communist Party of Slovakia on August 28, 1968, and he succeeded Dubček as first secretary (title changed to general secretary in 1971) of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in April 1969.

Husak reversed Dubček’s reforms and purged the party of its liberal members in 1969–71. He then concentrated on managing the nation’s economy while keeping a tight rein on internal dissent. He added the post of president to his other titles in 1975. Husak yielded his post as general secretary in 1987, when his opposition to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (“restructuring”) had put him out of touch with events. Communist rule collapsed in Czechoslovakia in late 1989, and that December Husak resigned as president and was succeeded in that office by the playwright and former dissident Vaclav Havel.