Normalization

JAN 01 1969 · 12:00

Gustáv Husák, who replaced Dubček on 17 April 1969 and presided over twenty years of normalization. Place: Central Committee plenum, Old Town · workplaces and party cells across the Republic Figures: Gustáv Husák, incoming First Secretary · Alexander Dubček, outgoing · Vasil Biľak, hardliner co-author of the 1968 letter of invitation Eight months after the tanks, the Soviets get the leadership they want. Husák, a Slovak communist imprisoned by his own party in the 1950s and rehabilitated by Dubček, replaces Dubček as First Secretary on 17 April 1969. Dubček is sent first to Ankara as ambassador (a clean exile) and then home to a forestry job near Bratislava. He will not appear in Prague again until November 1989. The new programme is called normalizace. The word is everywhere within weeks: in Rudé právo, in factory meetings, on the radio. It means the restoration of normal conditions; what it does is reverse every reform of the previous fifteen months in sequence, censorship reimposed, federalization frozen, the borders sealed.