Ludvík Svoboda

Ludvík Svoboda was born 24 November 1895 in Hroznatin, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) and died on 20 September 1979, Prague, Czechoslovakia. He was a national hero who fought in both World Wars.

In World War I Svoboda deserted from the Austro-Hungarian army, while on the Russian Front, and fought for the Czech Legion in Russia.

In the early 1930s he taught at a military academy. In World War II he initially went to Poland, forming a Czechoslovak militry unit there, before going to the USSR, where he was head of the Czech Army Corps. He first fought the fascists in March 1943.

After WWII Svoboda was appointed Minister of Defence, and did not counter the Communist coup of February-March 1948. He then joined the Communist Party and was elected a deputy to the National Assembly. Svoboda was forced out of the army (in which he had reached the rank of General November 1945) in 1950 under pressure from Stalin. He was deputy Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak government in 1950 and 1951. In the purges which followed Svoboda was imprisoned, and released in the Khrushchev period, subsequently heading the Klement Gottwald Military Academy. In November 1965 Svoboda named a hero of the Soviet Union, and of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (being awarded the latter title again in 1970 and 1975).

After the ending of the Antonín Novotný regime, in the period known as the Prague Spring, Svoboda was elected President of Czechoslovakia on 30 March 1968, on the recommendation of Alexander Dubcek, the First Secretary. Svoboda resisted the pressure applied by the Soviet regime under Leonid Brezhnev. He also secured the release of Dubcek when the latter, and other members of the Czechoslovak government were abducted to the Soviet Union in August 1968.

Svoboda survived the removal of reformist Communists in Czechoslovakia, and retired in 1975 on grounds of ill health.

Svoboda means freedom in Czech.