Peter Gowan Archive | ETOL Main Page
Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 No. 6, January–February 1979, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Born in 1927, Jaroslav Šabata joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia at the age of 19. At the age of 21 he became press secretary on the Party committee of Brno, the second most important Czech city. For thirteen years he lectured in Marxism-Leninism at Brno University and became head of the Psychology Department there.
In the spring of 1968 Dr Šabata, who was one of the leading intellectual influences behind the Prague Spring, was elected head of the Party in the Brno region and became a member of the Central Committee of the Party.
Dr Šabata was one of the few members of the Party Central Committee who resolutely refused to accept the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and because of his courageous stand he was expelled from the Party in 1969 and sent to do heavy manual labour in an iron foundry.
He refused to abandon his political struggle for socialist democracy and became one of the leaders of the socialist opposition and of the resistance movement against the Soviet occupation. When the Husak regime organised rigged elections in November 1971 Dr Šabata helped to organise a leafleting campaign, pointing out to voters their right to refuse to vote or to cross out the official list of candidates on the ballot paper. For this perfectly legal activity Dr Šabata was arrested in November 1971 and jailed in the summer of 1972 for six and a half years on a charge of ‘subversion’. His two sons and daughter were also jailed at that time on similar charges.
Already at this time Dr Šabata suffered from ill health. After a heart attack in 1964 he suffered from heart disease and also from duodenal ulcers. In prison he was unable to receive proper treatment for these conditions, was given food which aggravated his ulcer complaint and suffered a severe heart attack in 1972 which left him unconscious for some days. As a result of a letter he wrote to the Husak regime in 1973 – extracts from this letter, outlining this socialist views were published in Tribune at the time – his conditions of imprisonment were made stricter.
As a result of massive pressure from the Western labour movements Dr Šabata and others jailed with him were released in December 1976 when he had served just over five years of his six and a half year sentence. The remaining one and a half years of his sentence were not cancelled but simply suspended for a period of 3 years.
Despite his poor state of health – he retired on a disability pension earlier this year – Dr Šabata became one of the three spokespersons of Charter 77 in the spring, replacing former Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jiri Hajek. He was arrested at the beginning of October and has been held in prison ever since. If he is brought to trial it is likely that the government would try to make him serve the one and a half year suspended sentence from his previous conviction in addition to any new sentence stemming from his recent arrest.
Peter Gowan Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 15 February 2023