Czech History
Socialisation - Communism Takes Hold
At the start of 1948, the Communist Minister of the Interior sacked
eight non-Communist police officers. This move was protested by the
democratic ministers in the government, but to no avail. As a
stronger protest, they tendered their resignations - expecting that
this would lead to the resignation and subsequent reorganization of
the entire government. However, and much to their chagrin, this was
not to be. Instead, President Edvard Benes accepted their resignations, and
their positions were filled by Communist Party members or
sympathisers. Thus, from February 1948, all political power in the
country was in the hands of the Communist leaders. In Communist
propaganda, these events came to be known as "Victorious February"
(Vitezny unor) today they are referred to as the
"Communist Coup".
Almost immediately - with the parliamentary elections of May 1948 -
the Communists became more openly hostile to normal democratic
mechanisms. Non-Communists who attempted to campaign in the
elections were persecuted by the police, and voters were only
offered a list of candidates from the National Front - no opposition
politicians were on the voting list. Yet even using these extreme
measures, the Communists did not feel secure that their election
victory was guaranteed. So, to make absolutely sure that things went
as they wanted them to go, the Communists also falsified the
election results. Thus the parties of the National Front were
credited with winning an amazing 89.2 percent of the vote -- which
is still rather
a modest majority when compared with later Communist election
"victories," which would see the National Front win 99.9 percent of
the "vote".
On May 9, 1948, parliament had passed a new constitution
guaranteeing
a "leading role" for the Communist Party in political life.
President Edvard Benes refused to sign the new legislation, and so
he was forced to resign on June 7, 1948. On June 14, the National
Assembly elected Klement Gottwald Czechoslovakia's new (and first
'working-class') president; and on June 15, Czechoslovakia's fifth
post-war government was appointed with Antonin Zapotocky at its
head.
In April 1948, the Czechoslovak Parliament had passed legislation
nationalizing most companies that had more than 50 employees. In
actuality, though, even much smaller companies were nationalized as
a result of these laws. By the end of 1948, some 95 percent of the
industrial workforce in Czechoslovakia were employees of the state.
The next private sector to be eliminated were small tradesmen and
shopkeepers.
In 1949, the law on Standard Farming Cooperatives was approved,
launching the forced collectivization of agriculture. Industry was
reorganized to favor heavy machinery and military production, and
foreign trade was shifted away from western markets in favor of the
Soviet Union and its satellites. To better coordinate the individual economies within the Soviet
bloc, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) was
established in 1949, with Czechoslovakia as one of its founding
members. In addition to Comecon, the Soviet Union and its satellites were
united by the military Warsaw Pact, which was founded on May 14,
1955. This "Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance"
was signed by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary,
Poland, Romania and Albania. The Pact was concluded for 20 years and
then prolonged every 10 years after that; in 1985, just a handful of
years before it was to become defunct, it was renewed
for 30 years. It was formally dissolved by a protocol which was
signed in 1991.
The first Soviet "advisors" arrived in Czechoslovakia in September
1949, to show the locals how best to search for class enemies. Not
surprisingly, their first victims were Communists - and powerful
ones. The high point of the Communist Party's purges at this time
was the "trial" against the Secretary General of the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slansky - allegedly the ringleader of a
group of treasonous, counter-revolutionary conspirators. Many
historians today say that this purge was just so much thinly-veiled,
Soviet-style anti-semitism - as Slansky and most of the other
accused were Jewish. The repression and show trials of 1948-53 did much to populate the
forced labor camps - the most notorious of which was at the Jachymov
uranium mines - and to decimate the anti-Communist opposition.
Subsequent acts of resistance to the regime remained isolated and
unorganized.
It was during this dark and oppressive time that the writers and
artists Jaroslav Seifert, Vitezslav Nezval, Josef Sudek, Leos
Janacek, Bohuslav Martinu and Jan Zrzavy lived and worked. People
caught listening to rock and roll and other foreign music or
listening to foreign radio stations like Radio Netherlands were
considered subversives and thrown in jail. It was at this time, too, that the authorities - for reasons which
remain unexplained to this day - started to claim that the Americans
did not liberate the westernmost part of Czechoslovakia after World
War II. To those people who insisted they had seen them with their
own eyes, the authorities explained that those people they had seen
were really Russian soldiers dressed up in American uniforms.
Czechoslovakia's first "worker president," Klement Gottwald, died
in 1953, just 10 days after attending Stalin's funeral. Some say he
died of a broken heart; others claim he was the victim of a virus
that he caught while visiting Moscow, still others are of the
opinion that he drank himself to death.
In a little-known chapter in Czech history, 1953 also saw active
protests against the Communist regime, especially in Plzen and
Ostrava, because of worsening economic conditions. These rebellions
had to be put down by force, and the fact that they had taken place
at all was supressed by the
Communist regime. The ringleaders were sent to hard labour camps like
the one at Jachymov.
After the death of President Antonin Zapotocky, Antonin Novotny -
the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia - was elected President. For the first time, the
top posts of both the state and the Party were in the hands of just
one man. Later, it was learned that Novotny had been a spy for the
Gestapo during the war. During his presidency, Novotny had a fish
pond stocked with carp installed in the very formal Royal Gardens of
Prague Castle so that he wouldn't have far to go when he felt like
going fishing.
Well, time passed and in 1960, the Communists adopted a new
constitution which officially changed the name of the country to
"The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR)" because, as they said,
a socialist society - the first step on the road to true communism
- had already been achieved in the counttry. But even this spiffy new name did not help to slow the country's
rapid and alarming economic decline.
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