Michal Macháček: Husák

The name Gustáv Husák (1913–1991) is most closely associated with the period of so-called normalisation in the 1970s and 1980s, when a generation of “Husák’s children” were born. A new biography of Husák by Michal Macháček traces the long career of the final president of Communist Czechoslovakia from the very beginnings, exploring Husák’s origins and family background, youth, studies and enrolment in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, his activities in the war, the Slovak National Uprising and post-war politics, his conviction in a trial of Slovak “bourgeois nationalists”, his successful efforts at rehabilitation and his gradual return to the echelons of power. The book also delivers new findings about Husák’s personal life. In Macháček’s book this symbol of torpor and stagnation comes across as a more multi-layered personality than the common perception.