Gustav Husak; Czech Leader Replaced Dubcek in 1969

Gustav Husak, who replaced reform-minded Alexander Dubcek in 1969 and for the next two decades presided over Czechoslovakia’s hard-line Communist regime, died Monday.

Husak was 78 and last year underwent several operations for suspected stomach cancer. He was hospitalized on Nov. 8 in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak republic, and reportedly had been in a coma since last week.

A bespectacled lawyer, Husak replaced Dubcek as Communist Party leader in April, 1969, soon after the crushing of the 1968 “Prague Spring” reforms in which Dubcek sought to build “socialism with a human face.”

With Soviet backing, Husak purged the party’s ranks of more than 500,000 reformist members and reimposed communist orthodoxy.

Husak’s own downfall came 20 years later when he and other discredited leaders were expelled from the Communist Party for what the Central Committee described as abuse of power and wrong political decisions.

He then retired to live quietly, and in frequent ill health, to Bratislava, his hometown.

A skilled politician who served nine years in jail during the Stalinist purges of the 1950s, Husak’s rehabilitation in the party was partly helped by Dubcek, a fellow Slovak.

When Husak took over a country deeply embittered by the Warsaw Pact invasion of August, 1968, he pledged to continue Dubcek’s democratization attempts.

But he quickly abandoned his promises under strong pressure from Moscow and from a powerful hard-line faction that blocked attempts to reform the country’s fossilized political and economic structure.

It was early 1987--after the rise to power in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev--before Husak accepted the need for genuine changes at home.

Before he could enact his promises he retired as Communist Party chief in favor of even more hard-line Milos Jakes in December, 1987, the first Communist leader to quit voluntarily. (He was to keep the presidency for two more years.)

But Czechoslovakia, one of the most conservative East Bloc states, continued to lag behind as calls for democratic reform swept Eastern Europe in the second half of 1989.

Jakes, and then Husak, were swept away on a tide of peaceful popular discontent in a few weeks. Husak was succeeded as president by Vaclav Havel, a writer and dissident jailed for much the same offenses as Husak 30 years earlier.

“A Letter to Gustav Husak,” written by Havel in the mid-1970s, had been the first open criticism of human rights abuses by the Communist regime and led eventually to the drafting of the landmark human rights manifesto, Charter 77.

As state president, Husak’s last task before resigning the post on Dec. 10, 1989, was to swear in the country’s first government since 1948 that was not dominated by Communists.

Some of the new ministers who forced him to resign after the so-called “velvet revolution” were opposition figures he had imprisoned during his time in power. One, the new minister of police, had been released from jail two weeks earlier.