Milan Otáhal was a Czech historian who dealt with contemporary history, mostly the period of so-called normalization, and a former dissident. He studied Czechoslovak and World History at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. From 1955 he was a scientist at the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He participated in the reform process of the 1960s as a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was also one of the authors of the book Seven Prague Days, the so-called “Black Book”. As a result, he was expelled from the party and prosecuted. He was one of the founding signatories of Charter 77, and in the 1970s and 1980s he published the Samizdat Collection of Historical Studies.
