Editing Vladimír Mečiar (section)

=== Early period ===
Starting in the [[Communist Party of Slovakia (1939)|Communist Party of Slovakia]], the only road to prominence in [[Czechoslovak Socialist Republic|Communist Czechoslovakia]], he became committee chairman in the town of [[Žiar nad Hronom]], only to be dismissed in the year after the 1968 [[Warsaw Pact]] invasion of [[Czechoslovakia]], when he delivered a pro-reform speech to the national congress in 1969 and was thrown out. A year later he was also expelled from the Communist Party and then added to the Communist Party Central Committee's long list of enemies of the [[socialist]] regime. He put himself through the Faculty of Law of the [[Comenius University]] while working in a glass factory.