Jozef Lenart

Hardline prime minister of communist Czechoslovakia from 1963 to 1968

Jozef Lenart, who has died of heart failure aged 80, was the hardline prime minister of communist Czechoslovakia from 1963 to 1968. In 2002, he was finally acquitted of treason in relation to the Soviet invasion of 1968; an intervention which ended the Prague Spring and the project symbolised by Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face". Lenart was one of the highest communist functionaries to be called to account for his actions.

He was born in Liptovsk Porubka, a poor central Slovakian village. During the second world war, he was a Bata shoe factory technician and took part in the 1944-45 uprising against the German occupation and its Slovak client regime. After the Soviet-dominated liberation of Czechoslovakia, Lenart entered the Slovakian Communist party apparatus and, like Dubcek, another promising contemporary, graduated from Moscow's Communist Party University in 1953.

Stalin died that year, but Czechoslovak politics still bore his imprint. The country's unique interwar democratic traditions were seen as a threat which had to be subdued so that communism could flourish.

Lenart was a member of both the parallel, if unequal, organs of power in Czechoslovakia; the party and state. He joined the Communist party central committee in 1958 and was elevated to its praesidium in 1962. As prime minister from 1963 his function was somewhat subordinate to that of the party's first secretary.

Lenart was a consummate operator, skilled at weaving a path between the demands of reformists and conservatives, pressures from Moscow and domestic public opinion. His principal elevation happened when the party secretary, state president, and leading power broker of the 1960s, the Stalinist Antonin Novotny, was facing party and public criticism for the declining economy - in what had once been the world's 10th most prosperous country - and the Stalinist excesses of the 1950s.

Novotny was replaced by Dubcek early in 1968, and the Prague Spring accelerated. This meant relaxed censorship, and more political pluralism - while retaining communism's "leading role" - economic reform and work to separate the powers of state and party. Prague and Moscow hardliners began to worry that enthusiasm for these reforms was endangering the Communist party's dominance. Out of conviction, or opportunism, Lenart oriented himself towards the hardliners.

Tired of Dubcek's weak leadership, Lenart allegedly conspired with other hardliners and the Soviet ambassador in August 1968 in planning a "workers and peasants' revolutionary government" to seize power and legitimise the impending Soviet invasion. Instead, with Soviet tanks in Prague, the reformists had to go to Moscow to begin the capitulation. What became known as "normalisation" was a process that lasted until the 1989 fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.

During this period, Lenart retained his position at the apex of power; he was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist party's praesidium (1970-89) and first secretary of the central committee of the Slovak Communist party (1970-88). He was also head of the paramilitary Slovak people's militia in 1989, when the crumbling regime considered its use in suppressing student demonstrations.

In the post-cold-war world, Lenart faced a bleak future. In 1990, he was expelled from the modernised and democratised Communist party. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, Lenart, although a Slovak, acquired Czech citizenship. In 1995, he was indicted for treason, a fate also suffered by his alleged co-conspirator, Milos Jakes. The defendants argued that the legal framework of the time, as well as the statute of limitations, prevented their prosecution.

Only a handful of prosecutions have been successful. Lenart was acquitted on the technicality that he was not attempting to subvert the entire socialist system, according to the laws of treason operating at the time. In addition, the prosecutors were unable to cast sufficient light on the opaque events that preceded the Soviet invasion. Although he was acquitted, history may make harsher judgments.

· Jozef Lenart, politician, born April 3 1923; died February 11 2004