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Gustáv Husák

Gustáv Husák ( , ; ; 10 January 1913 – 18 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak 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.

Husák was born to an unemployed worker in Pozsonyhidegkút, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (now Bratislava-Dúbravka, Slovakia). He joined the Communist Youth Union at the age of sixteen while studying at the grammar school in Bratislava.

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. Provided by Wikipedia