Deserting from the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, Svoboda fought in the Czechoslovak legion in Russia. After the war he rose in the ranks of the Czechoslovak army. He was in charge of a battalion at the time of the Munich crisis (1938), which resulted in the occupation by Germany of large parts of Czechoslovakia. After the German seizure in March 1939 of what was left of his country, Svoboda went underground. He organized Czechoslovak refugee units in Poland, and, when that country fell during World War II, he moved to the Soviet Union as head of the Czechoslovak army corps. After Czechoslovakia's liberation in 1945, he was appointed minister of defense by President Edvard Beneš. A Communist sympathizer, Svoboda did nothing to prevent the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.
Although he joined the Communist Party in 1948, he was forced out of the army in 1950, on orders of Joseph Stalin. Imprisoned in 1951 during a Stalinist purge, he lived in obscurity after his release until an inquiry by Nikita S. Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led to his return to public life as a military writer and head of the Klement Gottwald Military Academy. He retired in 1959 and was named a hero of both the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in November 1965. After the overthrow of the conservative regime of Antonín Novotný in 1968, Svoboda was elected president of the republic on March 30, 1968, on the recommendation of Alexander Dubček, the new first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Svoboda firmly resisted Soviet demands and played a major role in securing the release from the Soviet Union of Dubček and his aides, who had been seized during the Soviet invasion of August 1968. He left public life in 1975, largely because of poor health.
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