INTENT ON COMPROMISE

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31967, 19 April 1969, Page 13

INTENT ON COMPROMISE

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter— Copyright) PRAGUE, April 18.

Dr Gustav Husak, a tough-minded Slovak once close to Mr Alexander Dubcek, who has now succeeded him as First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was determined on compromise fith the Russians after the Soviet-led invasion last [August.

! He became one of the fore;most “realists,” the men who advocate full co-operation with the Soviet Union.

A small, man with irongrey hair and rimless glasses, 56-year-old Dr Husak was among the small group of men who went with President Ludvik Svoboda to Moscow for negotiations on normalisation after the invasion. He was elected First Secretary of the Slovak Communist Party, the post once held by Mr Dubcek, last August 30 during the Congress of the ! Slovak Communist Party in 'Bratislava—with Soviet troops ! occupying the Slovak capital. Last October, together with

Mr Dubcek and the Federal Prime Minister (Mr Oidrich Cernik), he went to Moscow to sign a treaty on the "temporary stationing of allied troops in Czechoslovakia." He said that the treaty had opened new scope for the solution of Czechoslovakia's internal problems and the normalisation of relations with ! the Soviet Union. Dr Husak has maintained that anti-Socialist forces have been active in Czechoslovakia and have misused the ; liberal reforms initiated when Mr Dubcek took over in January. 1968. He has also charged them with slandering the Communist Party and hindering realisation of its programme.

Recently he went further. Last Friday he attacked the Czechoslovak party leadership and the Government for allowing irresponsible elements to use the mass media for spreading anti-State views. Dr Husak openly proclaimed himself opposed to the re-election of the leading liberal. Mr Josef Smrkovsky, a Czech, as chairman of the Federal Assembly, and said that extremists were behind him. Mr Smrkovsky was eventually elected deputy chairman. Dr Husak was born in Dub-

ravka. near Bratislava, onn January 19, 1913. As a 16-year-old youth hei joined the Komsomol and the Slovak Communist Party in 1 1933. He studied law in Brat- i islava and during his school : years earned his living teaching and working in factories and farms. When the party was dis-, solved by the Germans in i -1938 he went underground. Arrested in 1940 he was in- i • terned in the Illava Prison. He - was soon released and re-

I mained in Slovakia under ' police supervision. He was twice re-arrested and released—in June, 1941, when the Soviet Union and Germany began fighting and in May, 1942. He took a prominent part in the preparation of the Slovak uprising and in forma- , tion of the Slovak National Council. He appeared as a member of the executive committee of the Slovak Communist Party in 1945 and was elected to the first assembly after the liberation of Czechoslovakia. In August. 1946, he became chairman (Prime Minister) of the Board of Commissioners in Slovakia. In 1950 he was accused of being a “bourgeois nationalist” and dismissed from his post Arrested in February, 1951, he was tried three years later and sentenced to life imprisonment. In May. i 960, he was released under the terms of a general amnesty and three years later was fully rehabilitated. He returned to the political scene in 1968. and when Mr Cernik formed his first government in April of that year he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister.