Ladislav Adamec

Ladislav Adamec, politician: born Frenstat pod Radhostem, Czechoslovakia 10 September 1926; Czech Deputy Prime Minister 1969-87, Prime Minister 1987-88; Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia 1988-89; Chairman, Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 1989-90; married (two sons); died Prague 14 April 2007.

For a few brief moments in his country's history, Ladislav Adamec, Czechoslovakia's last Communist-era prime minister, had the opportunity to play a key role in shaping the transition from one-party rule to multi-party democracy.

Adamec's chance came in the course of the chaotic days of the peaceful "Velvet Revolution" in November 1989. Huge anti-regime demonstrations led to the removal of Milos Jakes, the head of the ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz), but the nascent opposition, led by Václav Havel, the dissident playwright, was not yet strong enough to take over the institutions of government. There was a power vacuum ready to be filled.

Adamec, a long-standing CPCz apparatchik, failed to rise to the occasion. Although he was instrumental in talking his more diehard colleagues in the CPCz leadership out of using force to clamp down on the protesters after the initial police violence had provoked further demonstrations, he lacked the political vision to go far enough in granting concessions that would satisfy the Velvet Revolutionaries. His half-hearted attempts to form a new government with the inclusion of a few non-Communists were rebuffed, and on 7 December, just three weeks after the first, momentous anti-government rally, he stepped down.

Instead of helping to usher in free elections in 1990 - a task that fell to a broad-based coalition government under a younger, more pragmatic Communist, Marián Calfa - Adamec was consigned to the margins of Czechoslovak politics with his election, at the end of 1989, as leader of the CPCz. It was a bitterly ironic "promotion" for Adamec because only a few weeks earlier, before the Velvet Revolution, that would have been the top job in the country. However, with the emergence of political pluralism, and following the exclusion of the CPCz from government after the June 1990 elections, the post rapidly dwindled in significance.

Born into a miners' family in northern Moravia in 1926, Adamec started work in his teens in a factory in his native town of Frenstat pod Radhostem. After the Second World War he moved into management, entrusted with economic planning in his home region. It was not until 1963 that he joined the Central Committee, the CPCz's "parliament" and administrative headquarters in Prague, where he rose to be in charge of the Industry department.

Adamec avoided any overt involvement with the "Prague Spring", the reform movement of the CPCz leader Alexander Dubcek whose attempt to introduce "socialism with a human face" was crushed by Soviet tanks in August 1968. One of the few enduring achievements of the Prague Spring was the creation of a federal system of administration from 1969, which included separate governments for the Czech and Slovak republics. Adamec was appointed Deputy Prime Minister in the newly constituted Czech government.

After nearly two decades in that job, Adamec, a competent if unimaginative administrator, was finally promoted to the post of Czech Prime Minister in 1987. A year later he took over from Lubomír Strougal as head of the federal Czechoslovak government. His elevation followed shortly after Jakes had replaced Gustav Husak, the veteran General Secretary of the CPCz. The changes at the top gave rise to expectations that the new team would introduce at least some reforms after the long years of so-called "normalisation" and stagnation associated with their predecessors who had been put in power by the Kremlin after the Prague Spring.

There was further hope of change because this time the Moscow leadership, under the reformist President Mikhail Gorbachev, was not so much trying to hold back the demand for a freer society in Czechoslovakia and the rest of the Soviet bloc as setting the pace of change. However, while paying lip-service to Gorbachev's reforms, Adamec and his conservative-minded fellow leaders disappointed those who were clamouring for the dismantling of the repressive apparatus of the state. If anything, the regime became increasingly alarmed by the drift towards genuine democracy in Hungary and Poland.

It was only the collapse of the equally hardline East German regime after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that prompted the leadership to grant a few limited concessions to the population. Adamec's government abolished exit visas for its own citizens on 15 November. By then it was too late. Two days later - emboldened by the mass demonstrations in East Germany - a pro-democracy demonstration was held in Prague. The brutal police response succeeded only in prompting more people to join subsequent protests.

Adamec was the only prominent CPCz official with whom Havel and the rest of the newly formed pro-democracy umbrella group, Civic Forum, were prepared to negotiate and he tried to adapt to the changing situation as quickly as an old-fashioned CPCz functionary possibly could. At a crucial meeting of the Central Committee he was among those who successfully resisted the hardliners' demand for a last-ditch attempt to crush the Velvet Revolution by force.

Only a month before these events Adamec had described Havel as an "absolute zero", and added that no party in the world would freely surrender its power. Now, 10 days after the initial demonstration, he joined Havel and Dubcek on the speakers' platform of yet another mass rally in Prague. However, he failed to seize the opportunity to identify himself with the will of the nation, and was jeered by the crowd when he appealed for a planned general strike to be called off.

Within days Adamec was out of the political limelight. His offer to include a handful of non-Communists in a new government was rejected by Civic Forum. In early December Adamec was replaced by Calfa, who, being 20 years his junior, was not tainted by association with the repressive rule that followed the suppression of the Prague Spring.

Adamec stepped down as Chairman of the largely unreformed CPCz at the end of 1990. He stayed on as an MP in the federal parliament until the 1992 elections, shortly before Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech and Slovak republics. Thereafter he lived in quiet retirement.

Gabriel Partos

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