Liberation - Post War Changes
Prague and most of the rest of Czechoslovakia were liberated by the
Soviet Red Army in May, 1945. That this would happen had been
decided by Roosevelt,
Stalin and Churchill at the Yalta Conference.
It was at this same
conference that it was decided that Czechoslovakia would come under
the Soviet "sphere of influence" after World War II. But, the westernmost part of the country - from the beer-brewing town
of Pilsen to the spa town of Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary) were liberated
by the Americans led by General Patton. It was in 1945 that the USSR officially
annexed this western part then known as Ruthenia.
On May 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied
Forces, but the last shots on Czech territory were fired on May 11. During the war, most of the members of the domestic resistance
movement had gradually become ever more leftist in their ideology,
since they were so vehemently opposed to the extreme right ideals
that were ruling it at the time.
Czechoslovakia's first post-war government was constructed
exclusively
from the political parties of the leftist "National Front." These
included the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the
National Democratic Party, the People's Party and the Slovak
Democratic Party. Pre-war right-wing parties were not allowed to
renew their activities, because of their real and/or alleged
collaboration with the Nazis. Left-wing Social Democrat, Zdenek Fierlinger, well-known for his
affiliation with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC), was
appointed Prime Minister. The remaining six government posts were
filled with Czech and Slovak Communists - Klement Gottwald, Viliam
Siroky, Vaclav Kopecky, Julius Duris and Jozef Soltesz. In addition,
the Communists were able to place their loyal supporter, Ludvik
Svoboda (later Czechoslovak President), in the key post of defense
minister. Thus, the extreme left gained a strong political position
in the newly-liberated country as early as 1945.
Democratic life in Czechoslovakia never fully recovered. The most
apparent demonstration of this were the 1945 Presidential Decrees
(today called the "Benes Decrees"),
especially those of October 24, 1945 on the nationalization of
coal mines, heavy industry, food production, banks and private
insurance companies. More than 3,000 companies - representing about
two-thirds of the overall industrial capacity of the country at that
time - were nationalized. Other presidential decrees were issued "on the punishment of Nazi
criminals, traitors and their supporters, and on extraordinary
people's courts" (the Large Retribution Decree of June 19, 1945);
and "on the punishment of some offenses against the national pride"
(the Small Retribution Decree of October 10, 1945). On the basis of
these decrees, not only the real collaborators - but also those who
were only accused of collaboration - were punished harshly and
without regular trials.
Before World War II, some 30 percent of the population in the Czech
lands had been Germans; in Slovakia, 17 percent had been Hungarians. In 1945, 700,000 Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia under an
agreement which was sanctioned by the Allies and had been reached at
the Potsdam Conference. This expulsion was, in
some cases, accompanied by brutality against the
Germans, which brought about protests by the Allied Powers. In the
second and more organized wave of deportation in 1946, 1.3 million
Germans were deported to the American zone (in what would become
West Germany) and 800,000 to the Soviet
zone (in what would become East Germany). Another 200,000 Germans
had fled voluntarily before the end of the war to the
American zone, and around 200,000 escaped to Austria. According to the Presidential Decrees, property which had belonged
to
many of these people was confiscated and put under "national
supervision," and the people themselves were deprived of their
Czechoslovak
citizenship.
Only about half a million Germans remained on the territory of
Czechoslovakia after the deportations, and just 165,000 of these
claimed German nationality in the first post-war census. In 1950,
according to the official statistics, Germans accounted for just 1.8
percent of the population in the Czech lands, compared with a pre-
war count of almost 30 percent. The Potsdam Conference, which had approved the expulsion of Germans
from the Czech lands, had vetoed the deportation of the
Hungarian minority from Slovakia, after the Allies saw what had
happened in the first deportations. Nonetheless, anti-
Hungarian sentiment was so strong that a significant number of
Hungarians did not claim Hungarian nationality in the 1950 census.
Official statistics from that census show a significant drop in the
number of people claiming Hungarian nationality in Slovakia, from
around 17 percent before the war to only about 10 percent after the
war.
Czechoslovakia's first post-war Parliament, the provisional
National Assembly, began its activities on October 28, 1945. Its
composition had been determined by an agreement among the political
parties and social organizations within the "National Front". The first test of the new political environment came with the
Parliamentary elections of May 1946. The results corresponded to the
expectations of the Communists, who won 40.17 percent of the vote,
making them the most powerful party in Parliament by quite a large
margin. The next strongest parties were the National Socialists with
23.66 percent, the People's Party with 20.24 percent and the Social
Democrats with 15.28 percent. In Slovakia, the Communists obtained
only 30.37 percent of the vote, while the Democratic Party took 62
percent. Two newly-registered Slovak parties, the Freedom Party and
the Labor Party, together received just 3.73 percent of the vote. In terms of the country as a whole, it was a landslide election
victory for the Communists. In the new Parliament, the Constituent
National Assembly, they won 114 seats, while the National
Socialists held 55, the People's Party 46, the Democrats 43, the
Social Democrats united with the Slovak Labor Party 39, and the
Freedom Party had just three seats. Based on the results of the May elections, a new government headed
by the Communist leader Klement Gottwald was appointed on July 6,
1946. Gottwald formed a cabinet consisting of seven Czech
Communists; two Slovak Communists; four Ministers from the National
Socialists, the Democrats, and representatives of the People's
Party; and three Social Democrats. Thus, the communists had a strong
grip on power well in advance of the "coup" which would take place
nearly two years later. Only two government ministers were not then
members of any political party. (They were Foreign Minister Jan
Masaryk (the son of Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomas Garrigue
Masaryk) would soon meet his death under mysterious circumstances -
and War Hero Ludvik Svoboda, who would later join the Communist
Party and later still would become Czechoslovak
President in 1968.)
On June 5, 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall
delivered a speech in which he offered assistance (which came to be
known as the Marshall Plan) from the United
States to all the countries of Europe for the reconstruction of
their economies damaged during the war. The Soviet Union had already refused to participate in the plan as
early as June 1946. And in fact of the future Soviet bloc
countries only Czechoslovakia considered taking part in the
Marshall Plan. After consultations with Stalin, however,
Czechoslovakia too, refused the aid. For the next four decades
Czechoslovakia would continue to follow Soviet orders.
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