The Development of the Leadership of the Communist Party of Slovakia from August 1968 to April 1969
The Development of the Leadership of the Communist Party of Slovakia from August 1968 to April 1969

Summary/Abstract: The study considers the development in the leadership of the Communist Party of Slovakia, a regional organization of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from the occupation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by the armies of the Warsaw pact and the extraordinary congress of the CPS at the end of August 1968 until the appointment of its leading representative G. Husák to the function of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPC in mid April 1969. In this period, the leadership of the CPS underwent a turbulent political development from an exemplary reformist communist body with the potential to continue the reforms at least to a limited degree, into a united bloc of Husák’s realists, who had the ambition to extend the Normalization process to the whole CPC. Apart from the objective international and internal political situation, this change was also strongly influenced by the high political ambitions of G. Husák, who showed his true face in this period, as a pragmatic political utilitarian, although, paradoxically, he had stood at the head of the reformist communists in the CPS from January to August 1968.

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