Gustáv Husák

Gustáv Husák (1913–1991) was a Slovak Communist politician who led Czechoslovakia from 1969 to 1989, presiding over the period of normalization that followed the Soviet-led suppression of the Prague Spring. His twenty-year rule ended in the Velvet Revolution, which swept his entire system aside in weeks.

Born in Dúbravka near Bratislava, he trained as a lawyer and joined the underground Communist Party in 1933. During the Second World War he became one of the leaders of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising against the Tiso regime and German occupation. After 1945 he served as commissioner for the interior in Slovakia and championed Slovak national interests within the new state.

In 1951, in the Stalinist purges, he was arrested as a bourgeois nationalist, tortured, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1960 and rehabilitated in 1963, he reentered politics during the reform ferment of the mid-1960s and supported Alexander Dubček's socialism with a human face. After Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in August 1968, however, he replaced Dubček as First Secretary of the Communist Party in April 1969 and oversaw a thorough purge of reform Communists.

From 1975 he combined the party leadership with the presidency of the federation. The November 1989 protests forced him to swear in the first non-Communist government and resign. He died in Bratislava in 1991, expelled from the party he had led.

Gustáv is the Slovak form of the Swedish royal name Gustav, often glossed as staff of the Goths. He carried it through partisan war, prison, and twenty years at the head of a state.