Alexander Dubček
Early life

Since 1989, many historians and scholars have paraphrased Gennadi Gerasimov, a spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev, when asked the difference between what Gorbachev and Dubček had done. He said it was 19 years. Many have questioned this since that time, better seeing nuance and particularities beyond cold war narratives. In fact, despite both future leaders profoundly questioning Stalinism at the time of Nikita Khrushchev 'secret speech' in 1956, Dubček had a family, upbringing, and early education very different from the conventional communist party training that many assume him to have, as well as fundamentally different education than both Gorbachev and Velvet Revolution leader Václav Havel. As Ivan Laluha points out, his thinking was shaped by his upbringing by unconventional parents, and personal experience of, and longtime associations with, utopian and international experiments and members that emphasized a consensus-style of leadership.

Alexander Dubček was born in Uhrovec, Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia), on 27 November 1921. When he was three years old, the family moved to the Soviet Union. He spent most of his childhood living on what some have called a commune in Kyrgyzstan. The settlement was in Pishpek (now Bishkek), in the Kirghiz SSR of the Soviet Union, now the independent state of Kyrgyzstan. It was a utopian Esperantist and Idist industrial cooperative, Interhelpo. Pavol Dubček, Alexander's son, described what his grandfather's family found as, "there was nothing there but an old barracks", after the family had come promised job opportunities and a good life. He said many of the first generation of immigrant children suffered typhus. Despite this, Pavol said it was "impossible" to go back at that time. In 1933 the family moved to the Central Russian city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod. Alexander was then 12.

In 1938, due to general orders by Stalin, they would have had to renounce their Czechoslovak citizenship in order to stay. With the same loyalty to their place of birth that Alexander would show for the rest of his life, the family returned to Czechoslovakia. At 17 years old, Alexander joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), working to organize resistance at his workplace. It was here, as a factory worker in Dubnica nad Váhom, where he learned his first trade. He worked together with his brother, Július, and with his childhood friend, Anna Borsekova.

They fought against the wartime pro-German Slovak state headed by Jozef Tiso. In August 1944 Dubček and his brother were ordered to join the partisans. They were members of the Jan Žižka partisan brigade during the Slovak National Uprising. His brother died in the uprising. The second and last time Alexander was wounded, he was sent to the Peterov family in Velčice to recover with Anna's help. Because of his participation in the uprising, this would be a bad mark against him during the Stalinist period, after authorities began amalgamating the activities of partisans in the uprisings with members of the wartime regime and other non-communist elements.

Dubček's father, Štefan, had been a member of the party since 1921. Upon his return he became active in it once again. Štefan was responsible for printing the party papers, forged and official documents, as well as producing other left-wing publications. During this time, the activities of Alexander and his family relied more on working through personal networks rather than party cells. The entire family was involved, shifting from one place to the next, eventually moving to Velčice. After the arrest of much of the KSS leadership in 1942, Štefan and the Dubčeks worked with another former Interhelpo member, primarily organizing communist youth. Alexander was arrested himself in July, but not before having significant impact and authority. After Štefan was arrested, Štefan was sent to prison and eventually to Mauthausen concentration camp, which he survived in part because he was there a short time.

Dubček married childhood friend, Anna Dubčeková (née Borseková), in September, 1945. They started a home in Trenčín.

Dubček began his studies at Comenius University in Bratislava, but he would return to the Soviet Union in 1955 to attend the University of Politics in Moscow, where he graduated in 1958 before he returned home. While in Moscow, Dubček's Russian friends learned of Khrushchev's 'secret speech' denouncing Stalin in 1956. It would be a couple of months before they would tell him about it. The speech had been an answer to stories circulating of those who had begun returning from false imprisonment in the gulag. As much as Dubček was disturbed by the news of what Stalin had done, he also admired Khrushchev for making the speech over the opposition of most of the leadership, who were themselves involved.
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