Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
체코슬로바키아 공산당
A Marxist–Leninist party in Czechoslovakia that existed from 1921 to 1992. As the Czechoslovak section of the Comintern it was a legal opposition party in the First Republic until it was banned in 1938; it seized power in the February 1948 coup and ruled a one-party state until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In 1990 it became a federation of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia and the Communist Party of Slovakia, which was dissolved in 1992.
In depth
The party arose when the Marxist–Leninist left wing of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, which supported the Comintern, broke away. The left constituted itself as the Social Democratic Party (Left) at a congress in September 1920, and after a clash over party property in December it called a general strike, which was suppressed. The founding congress met in Prague on 14–16 May 1921 and elected Václav Šturc chairman and Bohumír Šmeral vice-chairman. According to the Czech source, 569 delegates representing about 350,000 left social democrats attended. In the 1925 parliamentary election the party took second place with 934,223 votes (13.2%) and 41 seats, and in 1928, with about 138,000 members, it was the second-largest section of the Comintern.
At the Fifth Congress in February 1929 the so-called ‘Karlín boys’ led by Klement Gottwald took over the leadership and pushed through Bolshevisation under Moscow’s direction; opponents and many of the founding generation were expelled or left. The party won 30 seats with 753,220 votes in the 1929 election and held 30 seats with 849,495 votes in 1935. In the mid-1930s, on Comintern orders, it switched to defending democratic Czechoslovakia against Nazism. It was banned on 20 October 1938 under the Second Republic and went underground, and many of its leaders took refuge in the Soviet Union.
The party took part in coalition governments from 1945 to 1948, became the largest party in parliament in the 1946 election, and Gottwald became prime minister. After the February 1948 coup it held two-thirds of the seats in the National Front and in practice monopolised power; the constitution of 11 July 1960 enshrined its ‘leading role’. In 1951 General Secretary Rudolf Slánský and other senior members were arrested for a ‘Trotskyite–Titoite–Zionist conspiracy’, and after the Prague Trials of 1952 Slánský and ten other defendants were executed. According to the English source, nearly one million members were removed in the purges of 1948–1950.
In 1968 reformers led by Alexander Dubček launched the Prague Spring under the slogan of ‘socialism with a human face’, but Warsaw Pact forces invaded on 21 August. In April 1969 Gustáv Husák replaced Dubček as party leader, and the purges of the ensuing normalisation reduced the membership by about 27.8% between January 1968 and the end of 1970. In 1987 Miloš Jakeš succeeded him as General Secretary.
During the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 Jakeš and the entire Presidium resigned; the constitutional ‘leading role’ clause was deleted on 30 November, and the party gave up power in December. At its 18th Congress in November 1990 the party became a federation (KSČS) of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) and the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS). After the Slovak side renamed itself the Party of the Democratic Left and withdrew in December 1991, the federation was dissolved in 1992. A Czech law of 1993 and a Slovak law declared the party a criminal organisation.