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'''Challenger, Gray & Christmas''', with headquarters located in [[Chicago, Illinois]], is the oldest executive outplacement firm in the US. It has offices in 52 cities in the US and [[Canada]], and has operations in [[Japan]] and [[Mexico]]. The firm also conducts regular surveys and issues reports on the state of the economy, employment, job-seeking, layoffs and [[executive compensation]]. They also conduct one-off surveys on such subjects as workplace bullying, lost productivity due to the Super Bowl, and working women. Their core business, finding jobs for laid-off executives, is unusual in that they will only accept as clients people whose former companies will sponsor the client's job search.
'''Gustáv Husák''' ([[January 10]], [[1913]] Dúbravka (today part of [[Bratislava]]) - [[November 18]], [[1991]] Bratislava) was a [[Slovaks|Slovak]] politician, a long-term [[Communist]] leader of [[Czechoslovakia]] and of the [[Communist Party of Czechoslovakia]] in the [[1970s]] and [[1980s]]. His rule is known as the period of [[Normalization (Czechoslovakia)|Normalization]].
<ref>{{cite web |author= |http://www.challengergray.com/services/whoarewe.aspx |title=Who are we? |publisher=Challenger, Gray & Christmas |accessdate=2007-06-22}}</ref>
==LifeNotes==
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As a son of an unemployed worker near Bratislava, he quickly became a [[Communist]]. He joined the Communist Youth Union at the age of sixteen while studying at the Gymnasium (Grammar School) in Bratislava. In [[1933]], when he started his studies, he joined the [[Communist Party of Czechoslovakia]] (KSC) which was banned from [[1938]] to [[1945]]. During [[World War II]] he was periodically jailed by the [[Jozef Tiso]] government for illegal Communist activities, and he was one of the leaders of the [[1944]] [[Slovak National Uprising]] against [[Nazi Germany]] and Tiso.
After the war he began a career as a government official in [[Slovakia]] and party functionary in Czechoslovakia. From [[1946]] - [[1950]], he was a kind of quasi Prime Minister of Slovakia, and as such he strongly contributed to the liquidation of the [[Democratic Party of Slovakia]], which had won 62% in the [[1946]] elections in Slovakia, thus preventing the Communists from seizing power in Czechoslovakia.
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In 1950 he fell victim to a [[Stalinist]] purge of the party leadership, and was sentenced for life, spending the years from [[1954]] to [[1960]] in prison. A convinced communist, he did not cease to view his imprisonment a gross misunderstanding which he periodically stressed in several appealing letters addressed to the party leadership. It is well known that Antonín Novotný, the Czechoslovak president and first party secretary of that time, repeatedly declined to grant Husák pardon by assuring his comrades that "you do not know what he is capable of when coming to power". The true reason for Novotný's stance, however, may be ascribed to his personal politically motivated slovakophobia as well. Finally, as a result of the De-Stalinization period in Czechoslovakia, Husák's conviction was overturned and his party membership restored in [[1963]]. By [[1967]] he was attacking the KSC's neo-Stalinist leadership, and he became a deputy premier of Czechoslovakia in April [[1968]], during the period of liberalization under party leader [[Alexander Dubcek]].
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As the [[Soviet Union]] grew increasingly alarmed by Dubcek's liberal reforms in 1968 ([[Prague Spring]]), Husák began calling for caution. After the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia in August and he had participated in the Czechoslovak-Soviet negotiations between the kidnapped Alexander Dubcek and [[Leonid Brezhnev]] in [[Moscow]], he suddenly became a leader of those party members calling for the reversal of Dubcek's reforms. This change becomes understandable if we consider that he had been in prison for six years of his life, he was a highly intelligent and [[pragmatism|pragmatic]] person, and if we look at one of his official speeches in Slovakia after the 1968 events, during which he ventured the rhetorical question, where his opponents (i. e. supporters of opposition against the Soviet Union) want to find those "friends" of Czechoslovakia (i. e. countries in [[Europe]]) that would come to support the country (i. e. against Soviet troops).
[[Category:Employment]]
Supported by Moscow, he was appointed leader of the [[Communist Party of Slovakia]] in as early as August 1968, and he succeeded Dubcek as first secretary (title changed to general secretary in [[1971]]) of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in April [[1969]]. He reversed Dubcek's reforms and purged the party of its liberal members in 1969 - [[1971]]. During the two decades of Husák's leadership, Czechoslovakia became Moscow's one of the most loyal vassals. In the first years following the invasion, Husák managed to appease the outraged civil population by providing a relatively satisfactory living standard and avoiding any overt reprisals like was the case in the 1950's. This does not make his regime far from being brutal, however. Under the cover of everyday stability, there was a permanent activity of the ill-fated secret police (StB) targeted at the outspoken dissidents represented later by Charter 77 as well as hundreds of unknown individuals who happened to be objects of StB's preventive strikes. Husák yielded his post as general secretary in [[1987]], when younger members of the Communist party wanted to participate in the power ([[Milos Jakes]], [[Ladislav Adamec]]). Communist rule collapsed in Czechoslovakia in late [[1989]], and that December Husák resigned as president. In February [[1990]] he was expelled from the Communist Party. He died on 18 November [[1991]].
[[Category:Employment compensation]]
[[Category:Marketing research companies]]
==Functions==
[[Category:Public opinion research companies]]
[[Communist Party of Czechoslovakia]]/KSC (prohibited 1938, dissolved 1939-1945)
[[Category:Executive search firms]]
*1933-1938/1939 and 1989(December)-(February)1990: common member
[[Category:Companies based in Chicago]]
*spring 1945: member of its Provisional Central Committee (established in the parts of Czechoslovakia liberated by the [[Red Army]])
*1949-1951 and 1968 (August 31)-1989: member of its Central Committee and (except for 1949-1951) a member of its Presidium
*1969 (April) -?1987: one of its secretaries
*1969 (April)-1987: party leader (first secretary, since 1971 general secretary)
*1987 (December 17): resigned as party leader (replaced by [[Milos Jakes]])
[[Communist Party of Slovakia]]/KSS (illegal 1939-1944/1945)
*1939-1945: one of its leaders
*1943-1944: member of its 5th illegal Central Committee
*1944-1950 and 1968 -1971: member of its Central Committee and (except for 1970-1971) member of its Presidium and (except for 1944-1948) one of its secretaries
*1944-1945: vice-chairman
*1968 (August 28)-1969: party leader („first secretary“)
[[Slovak National Council]] (during WWII a resistance parliament-government, since 1968 the Slovak parliament)
*1943-1944: one of its main organizers
*1944-1950 and 1968 (December)-1971: its deputy
*1944-1950: member of its Presidium
*1944-1945:vice-chairman
[[Council of Commissioners]] (''Zbor povereníkov'') (a quasi government responsible for Slovakia)
*1944-1945: Commissioner of the Interior
*1945-1946: Commissioner of Transport and Technology in Slovakia
*1946-1950: President of the Council of Commissioners, in which he contributed to the suppression of the influential Democratic Party of Slovakia by the Communists (1947-1948)
*1948-1950: Commissioner of Agriculture and Land Reform in Slovakia
*1949-1950: Commissioner of Alimentation in Slovakia
[[Czechoslovak Parliament]] (called National Assembly and since 1968 Federal Assembly)
*1945-1951 and 1968-1975: deputy
*1969-1975: member of its Presidium
[[Czechoslovak government]]
*1968 (April-December): a vice-premier of the [[Prague Spring]] Czechoslovak government
[[President of Czechoslovakia]]
*1975-1989: President of [[Czechoslovakia]]
*1989 (December 10): resigned as the President of Czechoslovakia within the [[Velvet Revolution]]
==Other important data:==
*1929-1932: member of the Communist Youth Union (prohibited in 1932)
*1933-? : studies at the Law Faculty of the [[Comenius University]] in Bratislava, then a lawyer in Bratislava
*1936-1938: member of the Slovak Youth Union (1936 founder and secretary)
*1937-1938 vice-president of the Slovak Students Union and secretary of the Association for the Economic and Cultural Cooperation with the [[Soviet Union]]
*1940-1944: four times jailed by the government of [[Jozef Tiso]] for illegal Communist activities
*1943-1944: member of the 5th illegal KSS Central Committee, one of the main organizers of the anti-Nazi [[Slovak National Uprising]](1944) and of its leading body, the Slovak National Council
*late 1944- February 1945: he fled to [[Moscow]] after the defeat of the Slovak National Uprising
*1950: charged with „bourgeois nationalism“ with respect to Slovakia (see [[History of Czechoslovakia]])
*1951: arrested
*1954: sentenced for life
*1954-1960: imprisoned
*1960: conditionally released through an amnesty
*1963: his conviction was overturned and his party membership restored and he was rehabilitated
*1963-1968: scientific employee of the State and Law Institute of the [[Slovak Academy of Sciences]]
*1969 (April)-?1989: chief commander of the Popular Militia
*1971 (January)-?1989: president and member of the Presidium of the [[National Front (Czechoslovakia)|National Front]] Central Committee
See also:
*[[History of Czechoslovakia]]
[[de:Gustáv Husák]]
[[ja:グスターフ・フサーク]]
[[pl:Gust%C3%A1v_Hus%C3%A1k]]
[[Category:Cold War people|Husák]]
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