Czechoslovakia: from the Košice programme to February 1948

1945: the Košice programme and the National Front

In April 1945 President Beneš, back from London, arrived in Košice in eastern Slovakia, liberated by the Red Army, and a National Front coalition took office on the Košice government programme negotiated with the Communist leaders exiled in Moscow. The prime minister was the pro-Soviet Social Democrat Zdeněk Fierlinger, and the Communist Václav Nosek held the interior ministry. The government moved to Prague after its liberation on 10 May, and on 29 June, under Soviet pressure, signed a treaty ceding Carpathian Ruthenia to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. 1 2 3

In 1945 the Communist leader Klement Gottwald said that “the next goal is not soviets and socialism, but rather carrying out a really thorough democratic national revolution”, tying his party to the Czech democratic tradition and to anti-German national feeling. A clean wartime record and identification with the Soviet liberators lifted party membership from 40,000 in 1945 to 1.35 million in 1948. Presidential decrees of October 1945 nationalised the main industries. 3 1

Following the decisions of the Potsdam Conference, the German population was expelled. After the disorderly “wild transfer” just after the war, organised transports from January to October 1946 sent about 1.3 million people to the American zone and some 800,000 to the Soviet zone. A joint German–Czech commission of historians in 1995 put the death toll at no fewer than 15,000 and at most 30,000. 4

The 1946 election and the Gottwald government

In the Constituent Assembly election of 26 May 1946 the Czech Communists won 31.2 per cent and the Slovak Communists 6.9, together 38 per cent and first place — the best result a European Communist party ever achieved in a free election. Petr Zenkl’s National Socialists took 18.4 per cent, the People’s Party 15.7 and the Social Democrats 12.1, while in Slovakia the Democratic Party won 62 per cent. Beneš named Gottwald prime minister. 5 3 6)

Non-Communists held a cabinet majority of seventeen to nine, but the Communists controlled the police and armed forces and came to dominate the ministries of propaganda, education, social welfare and agriculture as well as the civil service. Beneš believed Czechoslovakia could be a “bridge” between East and West. 3 1

1947: the Marshall Plan refused and the Cominform

In July 1947 Stalin intervened against Czechoslovak participation in the Marshall Plan and the government reversed its acceptance; Beneš’s idea of a bridge between East and West collapsed. By that summer the Communists’ popularity had fallen sharply: Nosek’s police offended many citizens, farmers objected to talk of collectivisation and workers resented demands for more output without higher pay. The general expectation was that the Communists would be soundly beaten in the May 1948 elections. 1 3

At the founding meeting of the Cominform in September Zhdanov observed that Czechoslovakia was the one country “where the power contest still remains undecided”, and the Communist general secretary Rudolf Slánský returned with a plan to take power, declaring that “we have gone on the offensive on the domestic front as well”. That month Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, Deputy Prime Minister Zenkl and Justice Minister Prokop Drtina received boxes containing explosives. In Slovakia the Communists, using their majority in the central government, stripped the Democratic Party that had won the election of its power in 1947–1948. 3 7 6)

February 1948

In February 1948 Nosek set out to purge the remaining non-Communist officers of the National Police. When the cabinet voted by majority to reinstate eight non-Communist senior officers, Nosek, backed by Gottwald, refused. On 21 February twelve ministers of the National Socialist, People’s and Slovak Democratic parties resigned in protest, expecting Beneš to refuse their resignations — but the Social Democratic ministers under Fierlinger stayed and sided with the Communists. 3 8 2

The Communists organised the seizure of power from below. Valerian Zorin, Soviet deputy foreign minister and ambassador in Prague from 1945 to 1947, returned to help with the final arrangements. Armed workers’ militia and police took over Prague, Communist “Action Committees” drove opponents out of offices and institutions, and an anti-Communist student demonstration was broken up; the resigning ministers were barred from their own ministries. Before 100,000 people Gottwald threatened a general strike unless Beneš accepted a Communist-led government. Zorin offered the Red Army on the borders, but Gottwald declined. 3 9

The formally non-party Defence Minister Ludvík Svoboda kept the army in its barracks, and it did not intervene. Beneš, in poor health since 1945 and fearing civil war and Soviet intervention, accepted the resignations on 25 February and approved the new cabinet Gottwald proposed. Thirteen of its twenty-five members were Communists, and the ministers under other party labels were fellow travellers hand-picked by the Communists. 3 10

Masaryk’s death and the people’s democratic constitution

Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the only senior minister who was neither a Communist nor a fellow traveller, was found dead beneath a window of the Czernin Palace on 10 March. Suicide and murder were both alleged, and an investigation closed in 2021 found murder, accident and suicide all possible. The Slovak Communist Vladimír Clementis succeeded him as foreign minister. 3 11 12

The Communists consolidated fast: thousands were fired, hundreds arrested and thousands fled, among them the National Socialist leader Zenkl and Foreign Trade Minister Hubert Ripka. In March parliament gave the new government a unanimous 230–0 vote of confidence. On 9 May it adopted a constitution declaring Czechoslovakia a “people’s democratic state”, which Beneš refused to sign. In the single-list National Front election of 30 May the list officially won 89.2 per cent, and within it the Communists held an absolute majority of 214 seats. 3 7 13 14 15

In June the Social Democrats were absorbed into the Communist Party. Beneš resigned on 7 June and on the 14th Gottwald became president. When Beneš died in September, a vast silent crowd came to his funeral to mourn him and the democracy he had stood for. The Communist regime called the events “Victorious February”. 3 2 16

Aftermath: the Cold War and the trials

The fall of Eastern Europe’s last liberal democracy shocked the West. The Brussels Treaty of Western European alliance followed a month later, and the coup spurred quick adoption of the Marshall Plan, the creation of a West German state and, a year later, NATO. Western foreign ministers were meeting in London throughout the crisis of 20–27 February. 3

The terror soon turned inward. Milada Horáková of the National Socialists, who resigned her seat after the coup and chose not to emigrate, was arrested in 1949 and tried on fabricated charges of conspiracy and treason; despite appeals from Einstein, Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt she was hanged on 27 June 1950. Slánský, the architect of the takeover, and Foreign Minister Clementis were themselves executed after the Slánský trial of 1952 on charges including “Titoism”. 17 18 12