Gustáv Husák (UK: HOO-sak, US: HOO-sahk, HEW-; Slovak: [ˈɡustaːw ˈɦusaːk]; born Augustin Husák; 10 January 1913 – 18 November 1991) was a Slovak politician who served as the long-time First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1969 to 1987 and the President of Czechoslovakia from 1975 to 1989.
Trained as a lawyer, Husák rose through the ranks of the prewar and wartime Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and played a leading role in the abortive Slovak National Uprising. He participated in the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, but fell victim to a Stalinist purge in 1950. After being released from prison, he became a critic of Antonín Novotný's hardline governance, for which he was made a vice-premier in the government of Alexander Dubček during the Prague Spring. However, Husák came to share the Soviet Union's suspicion of Dubček's reforms, and established himself as a staunch anti-reformist in the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Husák was soon appointed leader of the Communist Party and General Secretary in Dubček's place, and presided over the period of normalization, whereby the Czechoslovak government reestablished its ties to the Warsaw Pact and aimed to preserve stable communist governance while minimizing social unrest.
The reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev challenged Husák's governance, but he initially hoped to stay neutral in the conflict between hardliners and reformists. Husák's resignation from leadership in 1987 did little to thwart the collapse of communist rule in the 1989 Velvet Revolution. He died in 1991, a few months after he was expelled by the reformed Communist Party. Husák was known as a sophisticated intellectual and skilled politician, but his pro-Soviet leadership was repudiated by the Velvet Revolution and subsequent political developments in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Early life, education, and career
Augustin Husák was born to Nikodém Husák and his wife Magdaléna née Fratričová in Pozsonyhidegkút, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (now Bratislava-Dúbravka, Slovakia). His father was a trained quarryman and farmer who was disabled in World War I and was sporadically employed afterwards; he worked in municipal administration and briefly served as mayor of Dúbravka. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was one year old and his father remarried; the household would eventually become crowded with ten members. Early in his schooling, he began going by the name of Gustáv, the name of his grandfather, he fully adopted the name after using it as a nom de guerre during World War II.
He distinguished himself academically and spent much of his youth at boarding schools in Bratislava, but his family's relative poverty necessitated that he take up odd jobs and send his earnings home. He joined the Communist Youth Union at the age of sixteen, after being influenced by ideologically engaged colleagues at the Patrónka arms factory, where he worked for a summer. He joined the Youth Union in 1929 at a crucial point, when the Czechoslovak Communist Party was being more closely integrated into the Comintern. Husák aligned himself with the pro-Soviet faction under Klement Gottwald. He met his wife, Magda Lokvencová, at a communist conference in Bratislava in 1935, and married her in 1939.
In 1933, when he started his studies at the law faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) which was banned from 1938 to 1945. During World War II, he was periodically jailed by the Jozef Tiso government for illegal Communist activities. He was one of the leaders of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising against Nazi Germany and Tiso. Husák was a member of the Presidium of the Slovak National Council from 1 to 5 September 1944.
After the war, he began a career as a government official in Slovakia and party functionary in Czechoslovakia. From 1946 to 1950, he was the head of the devolved administration of Slovakia, and as such strongly contributed to the liquidation of the anti-communist Christian democratic Democratic Party of Slovakia. The Democratic Party of Slovakia established in 1944 had taken 62% in the 1946 elections in Slovakia (whereas in the Czech part of the republic of then-Czechoslovakia, the clear winners were the Communists), thus complicating the Communist ambitions for a swift taking of power. Husák's loyalty to the central organs of the Czechoslovak Communist party as well as his considerable talent for body politics and a ruthless approach to political opponents contributed largely to the crushing of the Democratic Party's dissent in Slovakia and releasing the popular opinion in the country to the whims of prevailing political currents.
In 1950, he fell victim to a Stalinist purge of the party leadership, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, spending the years from 1954 to 1960 in the Leopoldov Prison. A convinced Communist, he always viewed his imprisonment as a gross misunderstanding, which he periodically stressed in several letters of appeal addressed to the party leadership. It is generally acknowledged that the then party leader and president Antonín Novotný repeatedly declined to pardon Husák, assuring his comrades that "you do not know what he is capable of if he comes to power".
As part of the De-Stalinization period in Czechoslovakia, Husák's conviction was overturned and his party membership restored in 1963. By 1967, he had become a critic of Novotný and the KSČ's neo-Stalinist leadership. In April 1968, during the Prague Spring under new party leader and fellow Slovak Alexander Dubček, Husák became a vice-premier of Czechoslovakia, responsible for overseeing reforms in Slovakia.
As the Soviet Union grew increasingly alarmed by Dubček's liberal reforms in 1968 (Prague Spring), Husák, originally Dubček's ally and a moderate supporter of the reform programme, began calling for caution.
After the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August, Husák participated in the Czechoslovak-Soviet negotiations between the kidnapped Dubček and Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Husák changed course and became a leader among those party members calling for the reversal of Dubček's reforms. An account for his pragmatism was given in one of his official speeches in Slovakia after the 1968 events, during which he ventured a rhetorical question, asking where the opponents of the Soviet Union wished to find allies of Czechoslovakia that might come to support the country 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 Dubček as first secretary (title changed to general secretary in 1971) of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in April 1969. He reversed Dubček's reforms and purged the party of its liberal members in 1969–1971. In 1975, Husák was elected President of Czechoslovakia. During the two decades of Husák's leadership, known as the era of Normalization, Czechoslovakia became one of Moscow's most loyal allies.
In the first years following the invasion, Husák managed to appease the outraged civil population by providing a relatively satisfactory living standard and avoiding any overt reprisals as were seen in the 1950s. His regime was not a complete return to the heavy-handed Stalinism that had prevailed during the first 20 years of Communist rule in the country. At the same time, the people's rights were somewhat more restricted than was the case in János Kádár's Hungary and Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia. Indeed, on the cultural level, the level of repression approached that seen in Erich Honecker's East Germany and even Nicolae Ceauşescu's Romania. There was a campaign of repression by the secret police (StB) targeting dissidents represented later by Charter 77 as well as hundreds of unknown individuals who happened to be targets of the StB's pre-emptive strikes. The repression intensified over the years as Husák grew more conservative.
Starting in the early 1970s, Husák allowed those who had been purged in the aftermath of Prague Spring to rejoin the party. However, they were required to publicly distance themselves from their past support for reform.