This letter was the second letter by the Czechoslovak historian and dissident Milan Hübl addressed to Gustav Husák, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; the first letter from February 1970 remained unanswered by Husák. Hübl could not comprehend how Husák, who had been a political prisoner in the 1950s and lived through the suffering of a communist prison himself, could restore the authoritarian regime after the repression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and persecute his opponents. In his letter, Hübl defends the former representatives of the reform movement who were stripped of their jobs for political reasons, and denounces the violation of human and civil rights in the country. “Where are the people,” he writes at the end of the letter, “who falsely charged you, interrogated you, judged you, imprisoned you and later tried to prevent your rehabilitation? You know better than anybody else which functions they hold now when you have to meet them, or the functions which you have to appoint them. You are in the snake-like grip of your former jailers.” This letter was one of the factors that resulted in Hübl’s imprisonment in 1972. Gustav Husák’s reply from 25 October 1970 is also part of the Milan Hübl collection in the National Archive.