Klement Gottwald

In February 1929, the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) marked a decisive turning point in the party's history. Gottwald led a rising left-wing group (Josef Guttmann, Jan Šverma, Rudolf Slánský, Václav Kopecký, and Pavel Reiman, collectively known as the 'Karlín Boys') in ousting the existing leadership under Bohumil Jílek and was elected general secretary. The takeover implanted in the KSČ the Comintern's 'Bolshevization' line, launched after the Sixth Comintern Congress (1928), which designated social democracy as 'social fascism' and insisted on an ultra-left, independent revolutionary course for the working class. Gottwald famously silenced internal opposition by declaring that 'we go to Moscow to receive orders,' and over the following decade the KSČ was recast as one of the Comintern's most loyal sections in both leadership composition and policy. The Bolshevization drive tightened party discipline and forged a revolutionary identity, but critics note that it deepened fissures within the labour movement in the early 1930s, delaying the formation of a united front against Nazism. Nevertheless, through this congress Gottwald built the political foundation for 24 years of undisputed leadership over Czechoslovak communism, lasting until his death.

In February 1948, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), led by Gottwald, seized state power by combining mass mobilisation with pressure from the police and armed militia, all while maintaining the outer form of constitutional procedure. The trigger was Interior Minister Václav Nosek (KSČ)'s purge of non-communist officers from the police. On 20 February, twelve non-communist ministers resigned in protest. They calculated that President Edvard Beneš would refuse to accept their resignations, thereby embarrassing the communists; instead, Gottwald took to the streets. Armed workers' militias and 'Action Committees' were organised across Prague and other cities, and on 21 February, before a crowd of 100,000 in Old Town Square, Gottwald threatened a general strike unless Beneš appointed a communist-dominated government. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin arrived in Prague to help with final arrangements, and the Red Army stood at the border, though Gottwald judged that political pressure alone would suffice without military intervention. Fearing civil war and Soviet intervention, Beneš capitulated on 25 February, accepting the resignations and appointing a new cabinet from Gottwald's list. A new constitution adopted on 9 May declared Czechoslovakia a 'people's democratic state', and the 30 May elections, held with a single list of candidates, confirmed communist rule. Beneš resigned on 2 June, and on 14 June the National Assembly elected Gottwald president. The coup became a watershed of the Cold War, spurring the acceleration of the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

As president from June 1948, Gottwald imposed the Stalinist Soviet model on Czechoslovakia under Stalin's direction. Industry was nationalised and the collectivisation of farms initiated, and when resistance to Soviet influence appeared within the government he instigated a series of purges. Czech-language sources record that under his government from the early 1950s numerous politically fabricated trials took place: more than 230 death sentences were handed down and over 100,000 citizens were sentenced to life or to long prison terms. The Office of the President's account gives the same figures and adds that without a court hearing about 80,000 people were deported to forced labour camps within five years, and that tens of thousands of 'anti-state elements' passed through forced disciplinary labour units. Leading Communist functionaries were not spared: Czech sources record that senior party officials headed by Rudolf Slánský were also executed.

The Horáková trial is the emblematic show trial of this period. Milada Horáková, a Czech politician and wartime resistance member, was arrested on 27 September 1949; her trial with twelve colleagues opened on 31 May 1950 as an intended show trial supervised by Soviet advisers, with interrogations using physical and psychological torture and a public campaign demanding the death penalty. She was sentenced to death on 8 June 1950 and hanged at Pankrác Prison on 27 June 1950. Prominent Western figures including Einstein and Churchill petitioned, but the sentence was confirmed; according to Czech sources Gottwald refused clemency despite numerous interventions and confirmed the death sentence. Her conviction was annulled in 1968 and she was rehabilitated after 1989.

The Slánský trial of November to December 1952 was an antisemitic show trial against fourteen members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia including high-ranking officials, framed as a 'Zionist conspiracy'. Rudolf Slánský was the alleged leader; all fourteen were found guilty, eleven were hanged at Pankrác Prison on 3 December and three received life imprisonment. Eleven of the defendants were 'of Jewish origin', and historians call the trial a key example of antisemitism in the Soviet Bloc. The trial was orchestrated on Moscow's orders by Soviet advisers invited by Slánský and Gottwald after the Rajk trial in Budapest in September 1949. One account holds that Gottwald, as president and party leader, feared being purged himself and decided to sacrifice Slánský, a longtime collaborator and personal friend who was the party's second-in-command, while the other defendants were chosen to threaten different groups in the state bureaucracy. Russian-language sources describe him as removing opponents from power, first non-communists and then senior party members including General Secretary Rudolf Slánský, Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis and Slovakia's leader Gustáv Husák, who survived the repression and later led the party.

The sources differ in emphasis on his responsibility. The Czech Wikipedia lead states that although he initially opposed political trials he could not resist Soviet pressure, and that he was directly responsible for the deaths of many dozens of his opponents, collaborators and innocent people, including Milada Horáková; other accounts stress that he drove the purges. The figures on death sentences and forced labour camps also differ between sources and are best given as each source's own tally rather than as settled statistics. After the deaths of both Stalin and Gottwald in March 1953 the harshness of the persecutions slowly decreased and survivors of the trials received amnesty one by one, but many further political trials followed, sending innocent victims to jail and hard labour in the Jáchymov uranium mines and labour camps. The party's later official historiography was quiet on the trials, vaguely blaming 'cult of personality' errors.