Lenart, Jozef

▪ 2005

      Czechoslovak politician (b. April 3, 1923, Liptovska Porubka, Czechoslovakia [now in Slovakia]—d. Feb. 11, 2004, Prague, Czech Rep.), through a studied ambiguity that permitted him to be seen as all things to all people, remained at the pinnacle of the communist political system in Czechoslovakia for more than two decades. He became first secretary of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party in 1962 and prime minister of Czechoslovakia in 1963, positions he retained as reforms accelerated toward the Prague Spring in 1968. He was dismissed as prime minister in April of that year, but he remained on the Czechoslovak Communist Party's presidium and was first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party from 1970 until the year before the collapse of the communist system in 1989. In 1995 Lenart was indicted for treason in connection with his role in the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. He was acquitted in 2002, but his role in those events remained unelucidated.

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