Bohuslav Chňoupek

Bohuslav Chňoupek (1975)

Bohuslav Chňoupek (born August 10, 1925 in Petržalka (now part of Bratislava ), † June 28, 2004 in Prague ) was a Czechoslovak politician, diplomat and writer. As Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1971 to 1988, he was one of the defining figures in the normalization between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution .

Life

Chňoupek's parents worked in public administration. He spent his school days in Bratislava. He completed his studies at the University of Economics in Bratislava from 1946 to 1950 as a graduate engineer. In 1945 he became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and was editor of the communist propaganda magazine Borba while still a student after the February revolution in 1948. After his studies he worked for the newspaper Smena until 1958, from 1958 for the Slovakian Pravda , for which he reported from 1960 to 1965 as a foreign correspondent from the Soviet Union. After that he was editor of Predvoj magazine.

In 1967 he switched to politics, initially until April 1968 as Deputy Minister for Culture and Information. After the crackdown on the Prague Spring, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was given important functions, first as director of state broadcasting in 1969, then as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1970 and finally as foreign minister from 1971, an office which he held until 1988 . During this time, as a native Slovak, he sat in parliament for Czech constituencies. He was a loyal representative of Soviet positions including perestroika . After the fall of the Wall, he was imprisoned for six months on charges of abuse of office.

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Bohuslav Chňoupek in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Literature by and about Bohuslav Chňoupek in the catalog of the German National Library