Soviet-backed coup
In late February 1948, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), with Soviet backing, assumed undisputed control over the government of Czechoslovakia through a coup d'état. It marked the beginning of four decades of the party's rule in the country.
The KSČ enjoyed a period of popularity following the reestablishment of pre-war Czechoslovakia. After a successful performance during the 1946 parliamentary election, party leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister of a coalition government at the behest of President Edvard Beneš. By summer 1947, however, the KSČ's popularity had significantly dwindled, and the party was expected to be soundly defeated in the May 1948 elections. This, along with the electoral failures of the French and Italian communist parties, prompted Joseph Stalin to harden his approach and order Gottwald to seize power.
On 21 February 1948, twelve non-Communist ministers resigned in protest. They objected to Gottwald's refusal to stop packing the police with Communists, and believed that Gottwald would give way. Instead, the latter threatened a general strike unless Beneš appointed a Communist-dominated government. Armed Communist militia and police took over Prague and mass demonstrations were mounted. On 25 February, Beneš, fearing civil war and Soviet intervention, capitulated and allowed the formation of a new government in accordance with KSČ demands. The Communists quickly consolidated their power following the coup. The National Assembly approved a new constitution on 9 May, declaring Czechoslovakia a "people's democratic state". The 30 May elections, in which voters were presented with a single list of candidates, all but confirmed the Communist victory. Beneš resigned on 2 June and was succeeded by Gottwald as president.
The coup's significance extended well beyond the state's boundaries as it was a clear marker along the already well-advanced road to full-fledged Cold War. The event alarmed Western countries and helped spur quick adoption of the Marshall Plan, the creation of a state in West Germany, paramilitary measures to keep communists out of power in France, Greece and especially Italy, and steps toward mutual security that would, in little over a year, result in the establishment of NATO and the definitive drawing of the Iron Curtain until the Revolutions of 1989.
Background.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) was in a favorable position. Its powerful influence on Czechoslovak politics since the 1920s, its clean wartime record and cooperation with non-Communist parties, its identification with the Soviet Union, one of the country's liberators, and its determination to become the country's leading political force without alarming the West (a strategy also followed by Communist parties in Italy and in France) dovetailed with popular opposition to Nazi rule, the longing for real change that followed it, and the new political realities of living within the Soviet orbit to produce a surge in membership from 40,000 in 1945 to 1.35 million in 1948. Moreover, the Soviets viewed the country as a strategic prize: it bordered West Germany and boasted uranium deposits around Jáchymov.
Nonetheless, party leader Klement Gottwald said in 1945 that "in spite of the favourable situation, the next goal is not soviets and socialism, but rather carrying out a really thorough democratic national revolution", thereby linking his party to the Czechoslovak democratic tradition (he even claimed to be a disciple of Tomáš Masaryk) and to Czech nationalism by capitalizing on popular intense anti-German feelings. During the early postwar period, working with the other parties in a coalition called the National Front, the Communists kept up the appearance of being willing to work within the system.
Thus, in the 1946 election, the KSČ and KSS won 38% of the vote. This was the best-ever performance by a European Communist party in a free election, and was far more than the 22% won by their Hungarian counterparts the following year in the only other free and fair postwar election in the Soviet area of influence. President Edvard Beneš, not himself a Communist but very amenable to cooperation with the Soviets, and who hoped for restraint by the Allied powers, thus invited Gottwald to be prime minister. Although the government still had a non-Communist majority (nine Communists and seventeen non-Communists), the KSČ had initial control over the police and armed forces, and came to dominate other key ministries such as those dealing with propaganda, education, social welfare and agriculture; they also soon dominated the civil service.
However, by the summer of 1947 the KSČ had alienated whole blocs of potential voters. The activities of the police—headed by Interior Minister Václav Nosek, a Communist—were acutely offensive to many citizens; farmers objected to talk of collectivization, and some workers were angry at Communist demands that they increase output without being given higher wages. The general expectation was that the Communists would be soundly defeated in the May 1948 elections. That September, at the first Cominform meeting, Andrei Zhdanov observed that Soviet victory had helped achieve "the complete victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie in every East European land except Czechoslovakia, where the power contest still remains undecided." This clearly implied the KSČ should be accelerating its own efforts to take complete power. That notion would be reinforced during the Prague Spring, when party archives were opened and showed that Stalin gave up the whole idea of a parliamentary path for Czechoslovakia when the Communist parties of France and Italy failed to achieve power in 1947 and 1948.
The KSČ's number-two leader, general secretary Rudolf Slánský, represented the KSČ at the meeting. He returned to Prague with a plan for the final seizure of power. Slánský remarked, "as in the international field, we have gone on the offensive on the domestic front as well." The KSČ pursued a two-pronged strategy. The party knew it had to maintain the façade of working within the electoral political system and was aware that a revolutionary coup would be unacceptable. It desired to gain an absolute majority at elections scheduled for 1948, but the fracturing of the left-wing coalition made this unrealistic. This pushed the party into extra-parliamentary action. The organization of "spontaneous" demonstrations to "express the will of the people" and continuous visits to parliament by workers' delegations were meant to ensure "mobilization of the masses".
The coup.
During the winter of 1947–48, both in the cabinet and in parliament tension between the Communists and their opponents led to increasingly bitter conflict. Matters came to a head in February 1948, when Nosek illegally extended his powers by attempting to purge remaining non-Communist elements in the National Police Force. The security apparatus and police were being transformed into instruments of the KSČ, and consequently, according to John Grenville, endangering basic civic freedoms.
On 12 February, the non-Communists in the cabinet demanded punishment for the offending Communists in the government and an end to their supposed subversion. Nosek, backed by Gottwald, refused to yield. He and his fellow Communists threatened to use force and, in order to avoid defeat in parliament, mobilised groups of their supporters in the country. On 21 February, twelve non-Communist ministers resigned in protest after Nosek refused to reinstate eight non-Communist senior police officers despite a majority vote of the cabinet in favour of doing so. Most of the ministers remained at their posts, with Social Democratic leader Zdeněk Fierlinger making no secret of his support for the Communists.
The non-Communists assumed that Beneš would refuse to accept their resignations, keeping them in a caretaker government and in the process embarrassing the Communists enough to make them yield. Beneš initially insisted that no new government could be formed which did not include ministers from the non-Communist parties. However, an atmosphere of mounting tension, coupled with massive Communist-led demonstrations occurring throughout the country, convinced Beneš to remain neutral over the issue, for fear the KSČ foment an insurrection and give the Red Army a pretext to invade the country and restore order.
In Grenville's opinion, had Beneš held his line, the Communists would not have been able to form a government. The historian believed there could have been only two non-violent means of resolving the crisis—give way to the non-Communists or risk defeat in early elections which the KSČ would not have had time to rig. The non-Communists saw this as a moment of opportunity, needing to act quickly before the Communists had total control over the police and threatened the electoral process.
At the same time, the non-Communist ministers seemed to behave as if this was just an old-fashioned pre-1939 governmental crisis. They did not know that the Communists were mobilizing from below to take complete power. Soviet deputy foreign minister Valerian Zorin, who had been his country's ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1947, returned to Prague to help with the final arrangements for the coup. Armed militia and police took over Prague, Communist demonstrations were mounted and an anti-Communist student demonstration was broken up. The ministries of the non-Communist ministers were occupied, civil servants dismissed and the ministers prevented from entering their own ministries. The army, under the direction of Defence Minister Ludvík Svoboda, who was formally non-partisan but had facilitated Communist infiltration into the officer corps, was confined to barracks and did not interfere.
Communist "Action Committees" and trade union militias were quickly set up, armed, and sent into the streets, as well as being prepared to carry through a purge of anti-Communists. In a speech before 100,000 of these people, Gottwald threatened a general strike unless Beneš agreed to form a new Communist-dominated government. Zorin at one point offered the services of the Red Army, camped on the country's borders. However, Gottwald declined the offer, believing that the threat of violence combined with heavy political pressure would be enough to force Beneš to surrender. As he said after the coup, Beneš "knows what strength is, and this led him to evaluate this [situation] realistically". Additionally, according to historian Igor Lukes, Beneš had been in poor health since 1945, and by 1948 was "a shell of a man" who did not have the emotional or physical stamina to hold out against the "rough, rough players" of the KSČ.
On 25 February 1948, Beneš, fearful of civil war and Soviet intervention, capitulated. He accepted the resignations of the non-Communist ministers and appointed a new government in accordance with KSČ demands. Gottwald continued as prime minister of a new government comprising 25 members–13 Communists and 12 non-Communists (nine members from non-Communist parties and three independents). In truth, the new government was dominated by Communists and pro-Moscow Social Democrats. The Social Democrats' leader, Fierlinger, had been a proponent of closer ties with the Communists for some time; as mentioned above, he openly sided with the Communists during the dispute. Members of the People's, Czech National Social Party and Slovak Democratic parties still figured, so the government was still nominally a coalition. However, this was no longer a coalition in any real sense of the term. The other parties had been taken over by Communist sympathizers, and ministers using these labels were fellow travellers handpicked by the Communists. The only senior minister who was neither a Communist nor a fellow traveller was Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who was however found dead two weeks later outside a third-floor window. Some friends and admirers believed Masaryk committed suicide out of despair. However, there was longstanding Western suspicion was that he had actually been thrown to his death, which remains to this day, with an investigation closed in 2021 ruling murder, accident, or suicide all possible.
Following the coup, the Communists moved quickly to consolidate their power. Thousands were fired and hundreds were arrested. Thousands fled the country to avoid living under Communism. The National Assembly, freely elected two years earlier, quickly fell into line and gave Gottwald's revamped government a vote of confidence in March. The 230–0 result was unanimous, although nine MPs had resigned following the coup.
On 9 May, a new constitution was approved by parliament, which declared Czechoslovakia a "people's democratic state." Although it was not a completely Communist document (indeed, the KSČ was not even mentioned), it was close enough to the Soviet model that Beneš refused to sign it. At the 30 May elections, voters were presented with a single list from the National Front, which officially won 89.2% of the vote; within the National Front list, the Communists had an absolute majority of 214 seats (160 for the main party and 54 for the Slovak branch). This majority