9

The Communist Takeovers in Europe – Indigenous Paths

The single most important reason for the establishment of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe following the Second World War was the success of the Soviet army in ending Nazi rule in the region. In a speech in August 1927, Mao Zedong, in words that were to become famous, told Communists that ‘power comes out of the barrel of the gun’.¹ While not a maxim of universal validity, this one applied well enough to east-central Europe in the immediate post-war years. Yet it was not the whole story. Socialism, whether in its democratic form or in its Soviet-style variant as preached by Communist parties, had gained greatly in popularity. In Western Europe there was not only revulsion against Nazism and fascism but also a response to the failures of capitalism – especially the existence of mass unemployment – in the 1930s and a reaction against the inadequacies of the democratic governments of those years. Among their mistakes had been that of trusting the promises of Hitler. Stalin had made the same error, but in 1945 he was held in high esteem in the West because of the huge role played by the Red Army in winning the war.

In many parts of Europe, then, there was ideational change as well as the strategic change brought about by Soviet force of arms. Socialism was increasingly believed to be a more just and more rational way of organizing an economy than capitalism. Planning was seen as a panacea which would either replace the vicissitudes of the market or, at the very least, moderate the inequality to which market relations gave rise. Public ownership in one form or another was widely held to be more socially just than private ownership of large swathes of land and industry. In particular, there was quite broad support for taking into state ownership both natural monopolies and what Lenin called, in the first stage of Bolshevik rule, the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Many people who counted themselves as socialists and shared these beliefs in 1945 were subsequently to modify or even abandon them, but the immediate post-war era, for all its hardship, was one of optimism about the prospects of socialism. A belief that ‘capitalism could offer only unemployment and misery’ was also combined with illusions about the advantages of the Soviet system.² Collectivization had destroyed the lives of millions of peasants. Stalin, in his own country, was responsible for the imprisonment and execution of political opponents, real and imagined, on an even larger scale than Hitler in Germany, but all this was, for the time being, overlooked. Soviet secrecy and censorship, combined with the suspension of critical faculties on the part of many Westerners who provided rosy accounts of Stalin’s USSR, meant that such facts were not nearly as widely known as they should have been.

The failures of the inter-war period, the breakdown of many social barriers which the war had accelerated, and the belief that something better than the pre-war order must be constructed with the coming of peace profoundly influenced thinking in parts of Europe where Soviet power did not impinge. Where socialist parties of a democratic type were already strong, they became the beneficiaries in Western Europe of the egalitarian and anti-capitalist tide of opinion. In Britain and Scandinavia, the Labour and socialist parties had great electoral success while the Communists received negligible support. In Italy, France and Finland, Communist as well as democratic socialist parties attracted broad support. Eastern and central Europe had a different political inheritance. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, right-wing authoritarian regimes had been the norm in the 1930s and they were now thoroughly discredited. Socialist parties of a social democratic type, as well as the Communists, had generally been suppressed – not only under Nazi rule but throughout much of the inter-war era. After the Soviet Union was attacked, and thus resistance to the German invaders became a Communist internationalist duty as well as a matter of local patriotism, Communists were very active in partisan movements. They had an additional incentive to work underground against the fascist enemy, for if they simply waited and hoped for the best, their chances of survival in Nazi-dominated Europe were going to be slim. Their party membership made them prime candidates for shooting or dispatch to a concentration camp.

The Communist takeovers of Eastern European countries which were directly Soviet-orchestrated are discussed in the next chapter. There are, though, three cases where local Communists achieved power for themselves – Albania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, although the Czech and Slovak case differs significantly from the first two.

Albania and the Leadership of Enver Hoxha

As noted in Chapter 8, the success of the Communists in resistance movements in Albania and Yugoslavia was on a scale which enabled them to prevail without Soviet support in the first case and with relatively modest help from the Soviet Union in the second. The Albanian Communists in the war years were, though, closely overseen by their Yugoslav comrades. The coming to power of Communists in these two countries, while largely independent of the feats of the Soviet army, rested, nevertheless, on the coercive power which the party leaderships had already built up during the war. In the Albanian case, since representatives of the old regime had left the country, the Communists faced no real competition. In Yugoslavia, Tito had got the better of his domestic enemies, whether the Serbian nationalist Chetniks or the Croatian fascist Ustaše.

Yugoslav help to the Albanians was primarily organizational and ideological and the Albanian Communists in the war years were heavily influenced by the Yugoslavs, who looked forward to being the leading player in a new federation which would embrace Bulgaria as well. Stalin and the Comintern approved of the idea, always on the assumption that Tito in Yugoslavia and Communist leaders in Albania and Bulgaria would be unswervingly loyal to Moscow. In 1943 Tito wrote to the Albanian Communists telling them that they needed to appeal to young peasants and that they had to bring into their partisan groups ‘as many as possible honest Albanian nationalists and patriots besides Communists’.³ On the foundation of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, Enver Hoxha was chosen as its leader, and he was to remain in charge until his death in 1985, making him the longest-lasting party leader in Eastern Europe. Given that the Albanian Communists came to power in 1944, his forty-one years at the helm of the Albanian state made him, moreover, the person who held power longer than any other non-hereditary ruler in the twentieth century.⁴ Hoxha, the son of a landowner, attended a French lycée in Albania and pursued his higher education in France, where he was attracted to Communism and wrote articles for the French Communist Party newspaper, L’Humanité, under a pseudonym.⁵

Even during the war years Hoxha was less enthusiastic about subordinating to Yugoslavia the party he led than were some of his colleagues, notably party secretary Koçi Xoxe, who headed both the party’s Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) and the secret police in the immediate post-war period. Hoxha came close to losing his party leadership, which for a time was largely nominal, since Xoxe was more in tune with both Tito and Stalin. In 1947, Xoxe approved a plan for a merger of Albania with Yugoslavia (which would also have involved Bulgaria), but the Soviet – Yugoslav split of 1948–to be discussed in Chapter 12–put paid to that. It also led to the execution of Xoxe in 1949 for the twin crimes of having supported union with Tito’s Yugoslavia and having opposed Hoxha.⁶

The Albanian Communists’ path to power had been smoothed by their earlier acceptance of Yugoslav advice. Members of the Communist Party (renamed the Albanian Party of Labour in 1948) constituted the leading echelons of a broad movement known as the National Liberation Front (or NLM). It attracted young people from well-to-do families as well as from the villages. As its military power increased during 1944, its ranks swelled. Albania – one of Europe’s poorest countries, with a population at that time well under three million – scarcely registered in the mind of President Roosevelt. The British had an ambivalent attitude to the contending Albanian groups. Some of those who took part in military intelligence missions to occupied Albania took the same view of the Albanian Communist-dominated partisans as they did of those whom Tito led in Yugoslavia – what mattered was that they were the people bearing the brunt of fighting the Italian and German invaders of their country. But whereas the main British concern was the defeat of the Axis forces in Albania, Hoxha’s highest priority was to attain political power, and he wanted to achieve victory over his domestic opponents (among them supporters of King Zog) in advance of liberating the country from foreign occupiers. This was strongly resented by some in the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Foreign Office. Such was the confusion that at one point in July 1944 Churchill, referring to the internal struggle in Albania, sent a memorandum to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden which read: ‘Let me have a note on this, showing which side we are on.’⁷

The seizure of power by the Albanian Communist Party in the autumn of 1944 was facilitated by the lack of any clear Western policy. The Soviet Union was clearly in favour of the Communists coming to power in Albania, while the USA and Britain were relatively permissive and not particularly well informed. By the time the German-supported government in the capital, Tirana, was overthrown, the partisan forces numbered more than 50,000. The Albanian Communists’ seizure of power is rivalled only by that of the Yugoslavs as the most indigenous of takeovers in Eastern Europe. Neither the Soviet army nor Tito’s partisans set foot in Albania. It was not a revolution, in the sense of a popular uprising against the old order, which produced a Communist government. This was, rather, a seizure of power which was the direct result of the invasion of Albania by the Axis powers and of the dominance within the resistance movement which the Communists had achieved.⁸

Tito and the Yugoslav Partisans

In Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans had by 1945 prevailed in the bitter civil war which had accompanied their struggle against the Germans. Yugoslavia was among the countries which suffered most in the Second World War, losing 11 per cent of its pre-war population between 1941 and 1945. Having been dismembered by its invaders, it was essentially reborn in 1943 when the National Liberation Movement, as the partisans led by Tito were known, met in Bosnia and established a National Committee of Liberation of Yugoslavia. It was headed by Tito, who in addition was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the supreme commander of the National Liberation Army. He was given the title of Marshal of Yugoslavia. The second session of the National Committee of Liberation determined that post-war Yugoslavia would be a federal state, in which the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins would each have a republic of their own, while Bosnia and Hercegovina, a historical unit with an ethnically mixed population, would constitute the sixth republic.⁹

In 1944, a new Yugoslav government in exile was imposed on King Peter by Churchill. It was headed – for the first time since the creation of the Yugoslav state at the end of World War One – by a Croat, Ivan Šubaši. His period in office was short-lived, for he and his government were pressed by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt – the ‘Big Three’ allies during World War Two – to form a provisional government with Tito. In that government Tito became prime minister and minister of defence. Thus, very briefly, Tito was the Yugoslav king’s first minister, but the earliest act of the Constituent Assembly, which was formed in Yugoslavia in 1945, was to abolish the monarchy and declare Yugoslavia a Federal People’s Republic.¹⁰ Tito had accepted three royalist representatives in his provisional government only under heavy pressure from his Western allies, and he later said that he regretted doing so.¹¹ Neither they nor anyone else, however, proved a serious obstacle to the Communists gaining exclusive possession of state power. Known collaborators with the occupying forces were, in many cases, killed; other opponents were intimidated or imprisoned. In the general election held on 27 November 1945, the voters were presented with a single list of candidates and so had a choice only of being for or against those nominated by the Communist Party. As Tito’s biographer Phyllis Auty put it:

    Few wished to vote against the party which had won the war and had such evident power; fewer still dared to put their voting disc in the opposition polling box. Tito’s movement obtained ninety-six per cent of the total votes cast…Though everything possible had been done to persuade people to vote for the communists, and though it can be presumed that the percentage for it would have been less had opposition parties been allowed, there is no doubt that Tito and the Partisans had massive genuine support at this time, and that they would in any case have obtained a majority.¹²

The Communists in Yugoslavia achieved in 1945 the monopoly of power which took most East European parties several years to attain. The Yugoslav power structure followed closely that of the Soviet Union, which meant that key decisions were taken in a small Politburo, chaired by Tito, endorsed by the substantially larger Central Committee of the party, and rubber-stamped by the parliament, which was entirely obedient to the Communist Party.

Many of the Chetniks took the opportunity to flee from Yugoslavia during 1945, but their leader, Draža Mihailovi, who could have done so, decided to remain in the country in the hope of leading a Serbian national rising that would overthrow the Communists. He was captured in 1946, put on trial in 1947 on the basis of the Chetniks’ collaboration with the German occupying forces, and executed, along with other Chetniks, in July of that year. Of the 12,000 Yugoslav Communists on the eve of the war, only 3,000 had survived the next four years. However, some 300,000 men and women joined the party during and immediately after the war. One of the strengths of the Communists, in a country with deep-seated inter-ethnic tensions, was their ability to bring together different nationalities, and for several decades they had some success in sustaining an all-Yugoslav identity. That this was based on consent as well as coercion was in part a result of Stalin’s excommunication of Tito and Yugoslavia from the international Communist movement, an action which strengthened patriotism on a Yugoslavia-wide basis. The ‘Yugoslavism’ of the Communist Party was reflected in the national composition of the top leadership. Tito himself bridged the ethnic divide. Not only was he (as noted in the previous chapter) by birth and paternity, a Croat and, on his mother’s side, a Slovene, but he was much respected by the Serbian Communists. His closest comrades-in-arms, who made up the central core of the early post-war leadership, were Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene; the Serbs Moša Pijade (who was also of Jewish origin) and Aleksandar Rankovi; and Milovan Djilas, a Montenegrin. A still broader, and more methodical, representation of Yugoslavia’s different nationalities was to be found in the Central Committee of the party, the body to which the Politburo was nominally responsible but which, in fact, it dominated.¹³ There were anomalies in the nationality policy, however, which were to become sources of acute tension in later years. As David Dyker observed: ‘Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Hungarians, Macedonians (for the first time) and Albanians (under the pseudonym of iptari) were all given official recognition. An uneasy note was, however, struck by the relegation of the Ethnic Muslims to the limbo of ‘undetermined Muslims’, with the implication that the sooner they declare themselves Serbs or Croats the better.’¹⁴ Decades later, the ‘Ethnic Muslims’ were to emerge as the new Bosniak nation.¹⁵

Czechoslovakia

The seizure of power by Communists in Czechoslovakia was a more gradual affair than in Albania or Yugoslavia. It was not so dependent on the position that Communists had secured in wartime and least of all on a partisan movement, for that scarcely existed in the Nazi-controlled Czech lands during World War Two, but it had deeper social roots as well as pre-war legitimacy. Czechoslovakia had been the most democratic, libertarian and tolerant country of any in central and eastern Europe between the two world wars. One aspect of this was the fact that the Communist Party enjoyed a legal existence and, as noted in Chapter 5, a respectable level of support. When Czechoslovakia was liberated from German occupation in May 1945, about 40,000 Communist Party members had survived the war. A conscious and successful effort speedily to build up the party membership meant that by the end of that year it stood at 826,527.¹⁶ In Czechoslovakia, as in other countries of central and eastern Europe which were to become Communist, a broad popular front was created, known as the National Front. In the Czech and Slovak case, however, although the Communist Party was the largest single component of the National Front (having emerged as the most successful party in free elections in 1946), this was a genuine coalition until February 1948. Like the Communist Party itself, the National Front had some roots in pre-war Czechoslovakia, where the five main political parties habitually formed a coalition known as the Ptka (The Five), in which they discussed and determined government policy.¹⁷ Another element of continuity was to be found in the continuation of the institution of the presidency. Except, temporarily, in East Germany – and, after the break with the Soviet Union, in Tito’s Yugoslavia – only in Czechoslovakia did the post of president exist in Communist Europe. It had enjoyed immense prestige during the incumbency of its first holder, the founder of the Czechoslovak state, Tomáš Masaryk, and continued to be accorded great authority when his close ally, Edvard Beneš, succeeded him in 1935. Beneš spent most of the war years in London as head of the Czechoslovak government in exile and returned to Prague as president in 1945. His re-emergence as head of state seemed to confirm that there had been a return to democracy.

In Czechoslovakia there was no anti-Russian tradition. Indeed, the Russians had traditionally been seen as a friendly Slav big brother – in a genuinely fraternal, not Orwellian, sense. In the whole of eastern and central Europe outside the Soviet Union, probably only in Bulgaria were remotely similar feelings toward Russia to be found.¹⁸ A positive attitude to Russia and the Soviet Union was further engendered by the fact that most of Czechoslovakia was liberated by the Red Army, while memories of the Munich Agreement of 1938 meant that Britain and France were still viewed with some suspicion. Whereas Poles had witnessed the Soviet Union actively conniving with Germany, in the Nazi – Soviet pact, to dismember Poland, the Czechs had fresh memories of the British and French attempt to appease Hitler by agreeing to the transfer of Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia heavily populated by Germans, to the Third Reich. In each case, historic perceptions of Russia were reinforced – still more distrustful in the case of the Poles, more supportive on the part of Czechs (especially) and Slovaks. Moreover, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had especially vigorously opposed the 1938 Munich Agreement and had argued at that time for an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Since Soviet troops had left Czechoslovakia after the end of the war, the emerging regime was not one put in place by Soviet tanks and bayonets. There was very strong support for socialist parties in the 1946 elections, especially in the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia. The Communist Party, which at that time appeared to embrace political pluralism, gained over 40 per cent of the vote in the Czech lands, 38 per cent in the country as a whole. When the votes of the Social Democratic Party and the National Socialist Party – a democratic socialist party having nothing in common with the pre-war German National Socialists – are added to those of the Communists, it can be seen that almost 70 per cent of the Czech population freely voted for some form of socialism. During the period of political pluralism between 1945 and the beginning of 1948, a number of socialist measures were implemented, including the nationalization of banks, insurance companies and key industries.

Throughout the first two post-war decades, in particular, the Communist Party had a higher proportion of the population within its ranks than any other East European Communist Party. The norm of around 6 per cent of the total population and one in ten of the working population in the party – which was typical of the Soviet Union during much of the post-war period – was always exceeded in Czechoslovakia. The party found it easy to recruit members immediately after the war both because of the Czech perceptions of Russia and of the Munich Agreement, already noted, and because, as elsewhere, there were people who were very willing to join, for careerist reasons, what looked likely to be the winning side.

The moment at which Czechoslovakia moved from being a socialist-inclined pluralistic political system to construction of a Communist state came in February 1948, when the Communists seized full power. They were led by Klement Gottwald, the son of a Moravian peasant, who had become the general secretary of the Communist Party as early as 1929 and who was to remain Czechoslovakia’s leading Communist until his death in 1953. Elected a deputy in the Czechoslovak parliament in 1929, he spent much time in the 1930s, as well as the whole of the war years, in Moscow, working in the Secretariat of the Comintern until the dissolution of that body in 1943. After the war Gottwald continued to be the most authoritative member of the leadership of the Communist Party. Next to him in authority in the early post-war years was Antonín Zápotocý, who had survived imprisonment in the German concentration camp of Sachsenhausen from 1940 to 1945. Although Gottwald always paid lip service to the superiority of the Soviet system, he was less committed to establishing a Soviet-type system in Czechoslovakia than was his counterpart, Walter Ulbricht, in East Germany.

THE MARSHALL PLAN

Alone among east-central European Communist leaders, Gottwald, in his capacity at that time as Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, would have been willing to receive American economic aid. In June 1947, the US Secretary of State George Marshall had announced America’s European Recovery Programme, which involved massive aid to Western Europe, partly to ensure that economic hardship in the aftermath of the war did not play into the hands of the Communists. Gottwald presided over a Cabinet meeting in July 1947 which accepted an invitation to the forthcoming Paris conference on the Marshall Plan.¹⁹ Stalin immediately summoned Gottwald to Moscow, for he had committed the cardinal sin for a Communist Party leader of going against the known wishes of the Soviet Union without even consulting Moscow in advance of the decision. The Soviet leadership did not allow any country it could control to receive such aid, even though the denial of it helped to widen the gap in living standards between the West and the East (understood as political categories, for, geographically, Czechoslovakia was in central, not Eastern, Europe). The Czechs were not bound to follow Soviet wishes, for it is very unlikely that – with no Soviet troops stationed in Czechoslovakia by 1947–Stalin would have dared to invade the country, given the extent to which the Truman administration in the United States was now alert to what the American president and his principal advisers perceived as a dangerous Communist expansionism.

Gottwald, however, was conditioned, in the final analysis, to follow the Soviet lead. He told the two non-Communist members of his Cabinet who had accompanied him to the Soviet Union, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk (the son of the country’s founding father and first president) and Minister of Justice Prokop Drtina, that he had ‘never seen Stalin so furious’. After seeing Stalin alone, Gottwald told them: ‘He reproached me bitterly for having accepted the invitation to participate in the Paris Conference. He does not understand how we could have done it. He says that we acted as if we were ready to turn our back on the Soviet Union.’²⁰ From that time onwards Gottwald was ultra-responsive to Soviet wishes. He reversed the decision on the Marshall Plan, rejecting any idea of Czechoslovak participation in it. With opinion polls showing that the Communist Party was much less popular than it had been at the time of the 1946 elections, a membership recruitment campaign was intensified.²¹ In the second half of 1947, the party increased its aggressiveness, with Gottwald fearing both the loss of support at home, should free elections be held as planned in 1948, and the loss of support from Moscow, since his flirtation with the Marshall Plan had so outraged Stalin. Later, Czech and Slovak democrats were to recall a remark Gottwald addressed to representatives of the ‘bourgeois’ parties in the Czechoslovak parliament as long ago as 21 December 1929: ‘You are saying that we are under Moscow’s command and that we go there to learn. Yes, our highest revolutionary staff is in Moscow and we do go to Moscow to learn. And do you know what? We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to break your necks, you patriots.’²²

The Marshall Plan was part of an American policy whereby Communism was being challenged both militarily and economically. In March 1947, the American president had enunciated what became known as the Truman Doctrine. Paying special attention to Greece (which was in the throes of civil war) and Turkey (on which Stalin had made territorial claims), and alluding to the ‘significant threats’ posed by Communist parties in France and Italy, Truman said it would be ‘the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.²³

THE COMINFORM

The Soviet Union established a successor organization to the Comintern a few months later. Called the Cominform, it was less powerful than its predecessor and did not embrace so many parties, but it did include all the ruling Communist parties in Europe, among them the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the majority party within the government coalition in that country. At the inaugural gathering of the Cominform in Poland in September 1947, a meeting dominated by the two senior Soviet representatives, Andrey Zhdanov and Georgy Malenkov, the delegates were told by Zhdanov: ‘The world is divided into two camps: the anti-democratic imperialist camp on the one hand and the anti-imperialist, democratic camp on the other.’²⁴ The latter camp – which, in the Soviet terminology, was described equally as the ‘democratic camp’ and the ‘socialist camp’ – was engaged in a ‘progressive unification’, and it was made clear to the Czechoslovak delegates that they should be part of that process.

By late 1947, the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia were determined to seize full power, and accordingly, they set about creating a crisis which would facilitate their takeover. They made demands and presented bills in parliament which were ‘politically or economically impractical but had the demagogic impact of being socially attractive’.²⁵ When these were rejected either within the National Front or by parliament, there was dire talk of threats to the state ‘from without and within’ from the agents of the forces of reaction. They also stepped up pressure on the Slovak Democratic Party, which had gained 62 per cent of the vote in the elections of 1946 as against the Communists’ 30 per cent in Slovakia, and were thus the strongest party there. Czechoslovakia was not at that time a federal state, and so the Slovaks were still essentially subordinated to Prague, where the Communist-controlled Ministry of the Interior made difficulties for the democratic forces in Slovakia. The leadership of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party was moving in a more anti-Communist direction. Thus, the Communists set about splitting both it and other democratic parties, partly by suborning, as Pavel Tigrid put it, ‘any third-rate politician in the other parties who was ambitious and venal enough’ with the promise of ministerial positions provided their name could be used at the right moment in support of a united list of candidates and on condition that in the meantime they also provide the Communist Party with inside information on what their own parties were planning to do.²⁶

The Communists also had a fellow traveller as Minister of Defence in the shape of General Ludvík Svoboda, who years later was to emerge during the ‘Prague Spring’ as President of Czechoslovakia, for a short time acquiring a liberal reputation, helped somewhat by the fact that his surname was in Czech (as well as in Russian) the word for ‘freedom’. He had actually wanted to formalize his relationship with the Communist Party in 1945 by becoming a member, but Gottwald told him that it was much more useful, when the Communists had to have parity within the government with non-Communists, to keep him in the ranks of the latter, while voting, nevertheless, with the former. When the push for full power in the hands of the Communist Party came in February 1948, Svoboda was able to announce that the army was ‘on the side of the people’, by which he meant the Communists.²⁷ Things came to a head with the Communists, on the one side, demanding a single list of National Front candidates in the forthcoming elections rather than competition among the various political parties, and the non-Communist parties, on the other, demanding a commission of inquiry into the manipulation of the police and security forces by the Ministry of the Interior (which was headed by the Communist Václav Nosek).

When the democratic politicians failed in this and other attempts to prevent the Communists gradually taking over all the coercive instruments of power, a majority of those who held ministerial rank offered their resignations to President Beneš. Already in failing health, Beneš unwisely accepted the resignations and did not demur when the Communists used their now clear majority within the Cabinet to implement all the measures, such as the single list of candidates for future elections, which they had been pushing for. They had been ready to use coercion if need be. The People’s Militia of Communist workers, which had been created by them after the war, had between 15,000 and 18,000 active members, 6,650 in Prague alone.²⁸ The army and the police were in reserve, but they were not required to play a major role in the Communist seizure of power. With the windfall of the resignations of the non-Communist ministers, Gottwald and the Communist leadership were able to move rapidly and peacefully to the imposition of a Soviet-type system. Beneš himself stayed on as president for several months, thus giving the Communist takeover an aura of legitimacy. However, just days after Gottwald’s coup, the Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, in what was probably suicide rather than murder, was found dead outside the ministry building, having fallen from a high window.²⁹ Beneš resigned in June, just three months before his own death. Gottwald succeeded him as president, with Zápotocý becoming prime minister. The Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia was frequently cited by its apologists over the next two decades as a textbook example of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’.

For many non-Communist socialists, it was a textbook example of political chicanery and skulduggery. Yet support for the Communists in early post-war Czechoslovakia came from idealistic young people as well as from cynical power-grabbers. It would be mistaken to imagine that the kind of system which was created in Czechoslovakia after 1948 corresponded with the wishes of a majority of Communist voters in 1946. As Vladimir Kusin observed:

    To say that these voters and supporters of the ‘Czechoslovak road to socialism’ were privy to Gottwald’s and Stalin’s long-term plans is ridiculous. After all they voted in 1946 to make the Communist Party the strongest in the country but not to endorse its monopoly of power for all times to come. If such monopoly had been at issue in a democratic election, the result would certainly have been different. The Communist voters were victims just as much as the more provident, who saw the danger clearly.³⁰

What occurred in February 1948 was not so much a struggle between capitalism and socialism as a clash between two concepts of socialism. Victory went to the Communist variant and took a form which overwhelmingly reflected the Soviet model as distinct from Czechoslovakia’s pluralistic traditions. The system soon produced (as will be seen in Chapter 12) a wide range of Stalinist excesses, including the execution of Communists who had fallen out of favour and the persecution on a wider scale of their democratic opponents.