CHAPTER 7
BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE
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After ‘Victorious February’, the Czechoslovak and Slovak Communist
parties found themselves in a position not just to accelerate the National
Front’s national and socialist revolution, but to lead the country onwards to
a fully fledged ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Just twelve years later (fifteen
years after liberation), Czechoslovakia declared itself the first country after
the Soviet Union to have ‘achieved’ socialism, and so to merit a new constitution
(1960) and a new name: Československá socialistická republika, the
‘Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’. The millions of Czechoslovak citizens
who had cheered for Stalin, Beneš and Gottwald in 1945, voted for the
Communists in 1946, or supported the Communist campaign to dominate
the other parties of the National Front in 1947, did not immediately have
reason to feel much tension between their instinctive patriotism as Czechs or
Slovaks and the international implications of their chosen system of beliefs,
practices and alliances. Nor, in the first flush of victory over the ‘reactionary
forces’ in February 1948, were most ‘progressives’ aware that they, too, might
one day fall victim to political persecution. This state of political innocence
could not be expected to last forever.
The 1950s in Czechoslovakia is remembered as the quintessentially
‘Stalinist’ decade of political show trials, bombastic propaganda and economic
restructuring during which Czechoslovakia was turned into a fully command
economy and a hardline authoritarian one-party police state. These were the
years in which virtually all of the Communist Party’s domestic enemies – and
a good number of its friends – were eliminated in the course of grand political
purges and witch-hunts; in which farms were forcibly collectivized
and regions clumsily industrialized; in which Socialist Realism pushed out
alternative forms of artistic expression; in which even the Leninist principle
of collective leadership was sacrificed to the Stalinist notion of ‘democratic
centralism’ and the cult of a single great leader – in Czechoslovakia’s case,
Klement Gottwald (or simply ‘K.G.’ as he was known on countless KSČ
banners and placards, busts, portraits and on the covers of coffee-table
books). But although the methods used to enforce change in Czechoslovakia
Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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178 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
gave it – as they gave other Communist states across Central and Eastern
Europe – a strong family resemblance to the Soviet Union, it is misleading to
think of them as having been imposed from abroad.
It was Czech and Slovak Communists, not Russians or Soviets, who turned
post-February Czechoslovakia into the Stalinist hell that it rapidly became,
even if they frequently invoked the Soviet example and often sought Soviet
advice on how best to do so. No one forced Czech and Slovak Communists
to hold up for emulation the Soviet example in everything, from how
to thresh wheat and write poetry to how to force peasants to collectivize
or interrogate political prisoners. The initiative usually came from the
Czechoslovak side: partly because the Soviet Union seemed to represent the
future; partly because its support seemed vital to national security; and partly
because it was a useful way of proving one’s political credentials, winning the
argument or getting ahead in one’s career. Appeals in political meetings to the
superiority of ‘Soviet methods’ – particularly by those who had no actual
familiarity with the Soviet Union – helped to make one look like a sound
comrade. They also papered over an underlying sense of unease that many
Czech and Slovak Communists were only just beginning to feel: the tension
between their ethnolinguistic nationalism and socialist internationalism.
The Czechoslovak Communist Party had come to power on the back of
Czech and, to a lesser extent, Slovak nationalism. In order to stay there, and
retain at least an outward appearance of legitimacy, it needed to co-opt,
neutralize or eliminate all actual or potential vehicles for the expression of
Czech or Slovak national feeling that might conceivably rival its own claims
to be the single legitimate voice of the Czechoslovak ‘nation’. To do so, it
drew more naturally upon Czechoslovak/Habsburg precedent than on Soviet
example; but after a certain point the distinction began to blur, authoritarian
police states all having a certain sameness about them. In the immediate aftermath
of February 1948, the party’s first priority was to secure and extend its
hold on power. Since general elections were looming at the end of May 1948,
the KSČ – drawing on the technique that had been introduced by the Tiso
regime in Slovakia – made provision for those who were not already excluded
from voting to be presented at polling booths with two slips of paper: one
giving the single slate of candidates drawn up by the National Front government
(which the electorate was expected patriotically to endorse); and the
second a blank sheet of paper (through which dissent, although futile, could
formally be expressed).1
It then sought to reinforce its credentials as the
authentic voice of the Czech and Slovak nations by following the first wave
of postwar nationalization with a second wave, rushing bills through parliament
to nationalize radio stations, the construction industry, private flats, and
all businesses that employed more than fifty people.2 Rather than follow the
Soviet example of criminalizing small-time peasants, an important source of
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 179
party support, it set the limit for private land ownership at the reassuring
figure of 50 hectares (124 acres), the same cut-off point that the Czech
Agrarian movement of the late nineteenth century had judged to correspond
to the yeoman class that embodied ‘the core of Czech rural values’.3
On 9 May 1948, the third anniversary of the official liberation of Prague,
the National Assembly passed the new constitution that the Communists had
promised in 1946. Rather than reproduce Stalin’s 1936 constitution (which
still applied in the Soviet Union), Czechoslovakia’s own constitution of 1920
was updated and amended to include the political, social and constitutional
changes that had occurred since May 1945, and to make explicit that it was
now officially ‘the will’ of the Czech and Slovak peoples to ‘build up’ the
‘liberated state’ into a ‘people’s democracy’ to guarantee a ‘peaceful path to
socialism’ and defend the ‘national and democratic revolution’ against ‘reaction’,
whether domestic or foreign, ‘just as we defended it in February 1948’.4
The Ninth of May Constitution defined Czechoslovakia, like other newly
Communist states in the region, as a ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ in which
all power resided in ‘the people’; but also, in line with the promises that had
been given at Košice, as a ‘unitary state of two equal Slavonic nations, the
Czechs and the Slovaks’.5 As in all previous Czechoslovak/Czecho-Slovak
republics, the president, who was elected by the National Assembly for a
seven-year term, remained head of state, and the government, defined as the
highest legal and governing authority, was declared answerable to the National
Assembly.6 As had been promised in the ‘Slovak Magna Carta’ of 1945, the
Slovak National Council (Slovenská národná rada/Slovenská národní rada) and
Board of Commissioners (Zbor povereníkov/sbor pověřenců) were defined as the
‘bearers of power’ in Slovakia and ‘equality between Czechs and Slovaks’ was
guaranteed ‘in the spirit of a people’s democracy’.7 Finally, again in keeping
with what had been agreed during the war and confirmed at Košice, the
‘bearers of state power’ at the local, district and regional levels were declared
to be the National Committees (the same organizations that Karol Sidor
had once suggested using to spread support for the Hlinka Slovak People’s
Party, but which were now used to empower the KSČ ).8 Just as the prewar
Tiso regime had made it possible to express Slovak patriotism only through
the extreme right-wing Slovak National Unity, the new postwar regime now
ensured that it could be expressed only through the extreme left-wing
Communist-dominated National Front. To underline the point, post-February
Czechoslovakia’s first big political show trial – of the general secretaries and
deputies of the Slovak Democratic Party – was held in Bratislava, ending with
the conviction, on 15 May 1948, of all the accused.
General elections went ahead, as scheduled, on 30 May 1948, amid a strong
campaign run by the Communist Party to persuade voters not to use the
privacy of the polling booth to return a blank form, but rather to vote
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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180 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
‘openly’ for the Communist-dominated list of approved National Front
candidates. There was even a special election jingle, set to the tune of a wellknown
nursery rhyme, suggesting that only a traitor would choose to vote
against the National Front.9 Having chosen to go behind the screen to use the
blank ballot, Eva Blochová remembered her terror when, upon leaving the
polling station, she was asked to place her unused ballot in a bin. ‘Now they
would know how I voted!’ she suddenly realized.10 When the election results
were announced, giving an astonishingly high 87.12 per cent of Czech and
84.91 per cent of Slovak votes to the single list of Communist-dominated
National Front candidates (meaning that only 9 per cent of voters in the
Czech lands and 14 per cent in Slovakia had used the blank return), it was
clear to everyone that the campaign of intimidation – combined with appeals
to patriotism and national unity – had worked.11
On 7 June 1948, for the second time in his career, an outmanoeuvred,
depressed and ill Edvard Beneš resigned as president, leaving it to the prime
minister and chairman of the KSČ, Klement Gottwald, to step temporarily
into his place. It was thus Gottwald, rather than Beneš, who signed the new
constitution into law on 9 June 1948; but this was a mere technicality. Five days
later, Gottwald was unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia,
retaining his place as party chairman. Antonín Zápotocký (the chairman of
the Central Council of Trade Unions who had been Gottwald’s right-hand
man during the February Events) took over as the country’s second ‘worker’
(i.e. Communist) prime minister, while the impeccably Stalinist Rudolf Slánský
remained in his post as secretary-general of the KSČ. The inauguration of
the first Czechoslovak Communist president was held, as usual, in St Vitus
Cathedral at Hradčany and celebrated with a Te Deum presided over by the
bishop of Prague, Josef Beran. Although the Gottwalds, obviously unused to
Church ceremony, looked ill at ease and had to be discreetly steered by the
bishop and officiating priests, the very fact that they appeared in church
seemed to signal that distinctively Czechoslovak traditions would be preserved
and to indicate that non-Communists might not have too much to fear from
the new dictatorship.
Once the requisite measures had been taken to ensure that the Communist
Party’s domination of the National Assembly, cabinet and presidency could
not be challenged through either the constitution or the ballot box, the KSČ
concentrated on removing its own most obvious sources of weakness: the
inclusion of too many card-carrying members to ensure strict obedience to
the leadership’s directives; and the existence of a separate, Slovak branch
which held the potential to challenge Prague’s authority to speak on behalf
of both nations in the state. From 15 July, the KSČ launched a policy of selective
recruitment for new members, who were no longer to be welcomed automatically,
but rather screened first for appropriate political views and class
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 181
origins. Special short courses were set up by the party to fast-track workers
without university education into influential positions in the law courts, the
secret police, the army, industrial management and every other sphere in
which the middle classes had formerly been dominant. Everyone could feel
the sudden emphasis on the ‘importance of cadre’: in other words, the
purging of those said to be insufficiently politically committed or socially
suspect and their replacement with irreproachably ‘loyal’ and zealous
Communists, preferably of working-class background.12
The next matter to be tidied up was the role of the Slovak Communist
Party. The formal expulsion of Yugoslavia (28 June 1948) from the recently
formed Information Bureau of the Communist parties (Cominform), the
obvious successor to the Comintern, gave the KSČ leadership in Prague the
perfect excuse to blame its ruthless internal reordering on what was vaguely
termed the ‘international situation’. When the KSČ Presidium of the Central
Committee met at the end of June to discuss the Soviet–Yugoslav split, it did
not point the finger at President Gottwald, although his slogan, as the leader
of the Communist Party throughout the Third Republic, had echoed Tito’s
in promising that Czechoslovakia would follow its own ‘road to socialism’.
Instead, as Slovak Communist Eugen Steiner remembered incredulously, it
‘almost expressly stated’ that the analogy to the Yugoslav problem was rather
to be found in Slovakia’s tendency to want to go its own way.13 On 26–27 July
1948, the KSČ Presidium announced that ‘the working class and the toiling
masses of Czechoslovakia’ required ‘one political leadership in the form of a
united Communist Party’.14 The KSS was explicitly asked to make it clear that
it was ‘subordinate’ to the KSČ and that the role of its Central Committee was
merely to ‘carry out’ the policy directives given to it by the KSČ. At the next
plenum, held on 27 September 1948, the KSS duly defined itself as ‘a territorial
organization’ of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia ‘in Slovakia’. Its
subordinate position was then formally cemented at the Ninth Party Congress,
held in 1949.15
Having neutralized the KSS, the KSČ turned its attention to its remaining
rivals: institutions that could conceivably claim to speak for ‘the nation’ in its
stead. These, if at all possible, were to be persuaded to join in the ‘unity’
shown by the ‘National Front’: in other words, to obey the KSČ. Organizations
that agreed to do so would be fêted and included as part of the ‘nation’ and
the ‘working class’; those that refused to cooperate would be neutralized or
destroyed. The KSČ increasingly relied upon the Ministry of the Interior to
remain ‘vigilant’ to ‘secure’ the ‘gains’ of February 1948 by staying alert to the
risks presented by any gathering, anniversary or memorial that might conceivably
seek to ‘reverse’ its ‘achievements’ by upstaging its own claims to speak
for ‘the working people’ and ‘the nation’. Sokol, the patriotic gymnastic organization
that had done so much to spread Czech nationalism in the nineteenth
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Created from gla on 2020-11-06 07:22:31.
Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
182 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
century, that had been actively supported and promoted as part of
Czechoslovak identity by T.G. Masaryk, and that had once again proved its
nationalist credentials during the war, was just such an organization; and the
first postwar Sokol jamboree (slet), scheduled for 5–6 July 1948, offered just
such an opportunity. To make matters even worse, the current head of the
state-wide Sokol organization, Antonín Hřebík, who had been interned by the
Nazis in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and the Gestapo prison at Benešov, was a
member of the Czech National Socialist Party, the only political party to which
President Beneš had ever belonged and the one with the longest Czech nationalist
and socialist pedigree. But although Hřebík is now remembered as having
been a brave opponent of the Communist regime, his files in the Ministry of
the Interior tell another story.
When Hřebík was first called in for questioning in March 1948, he was
no stranger to the secret police. The StB already had a thick file of reports
that had been sent in regularly since 1946 by his secretary, František Beneš,
that covered everything from his circle of acquaintance and the state of his
marriage to his private vanities and other foibles of character.16 Despite the
viciousness of these reports, which were obviously intended to damage him
as much as possible in the eyes of the Communist authorities, Hřebík’s secretpolice
interrogators found that he had in fact behaved ‘absolutely loyally’
during the February Events, having immediately ordered all branches of Sokol
to form Action Committees to ‘come to the defence of the National Front’.
As far as the StB officers could judge, Hřebík appeared sincerely to believe that
Sokolists and Communists held certain core values in common – such as
‘masculinity, openness and loyalty to their ideals’.17 Since it became obvious
during his interrogation that Hřebík, far from being a dangerous opponent,
was prepared to help the regime there was no need to downplay or cancel the
first postwar Sokol jamboree; instead, a special commemorative postage stamp
was issued to celebrate this symbol of Czech liberty and unity after what were
euphemistically described as the years of ‘unfreedom’.18
By mid-June 1948, the StB had gathered information – including members’
names, addresses, employment and political profiles – on every Sokol group
throughout the whole of the country. They also knew, from a careless conversation
in a public tram, that some Sokolists were opposed to the Communist
takeover and determined ‘to show Prague’ what ‘it means to be a Sokol’.19
Although plans had already been drawn up for SNB and StB officers to be
stationed at every point along the route of the Sokol march, the Ministry of
the Interior issued further directives that anyone who ‘took advantage’ of the
slet to call out ‘provocative’ or ‘anti-state’ slogans – such as ‘Long live Beneš’
or ‘Long live Beneš and Masaryk’s republic’ – should immediately be placed
under arrest and taken away.20 Although the slet went off quietly in Prague,
the StB was nevertheless able to report that it had arrested 230 ‘anti-state
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Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 183
agitators’ and heard a total of fifty-five provocative chants, including ‘Let
the world hear! Beneš must come back’ and ‘Every Sokol knows that truth
alone will prevail’.21 This gave the government the excuse to request that
Sokol, like every other sporting organization, be merged into a single, unified
Czechoslovak Sports Union, a move that Hřebík apparently supported.
The reorganization bore political fruit at the 1952 Olympic Games (the first
in which the Soviet Union consented to participate, walking away with twentytwo
gold medals), when Czech long-distance runner Emil Zátopek won three
gold medals for the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia. This enabled the
Party once again to blend Czech patriotism with propaganda about the superiority
of socialist man, and gave it an excuse to launch a special government
crusade to ‘raise the political and athletic level of all sportsmen and gymnasts
in Czechoslovakia’.22 Even the fact that Zátopek’s wife, Dana (herself an
outstanding sportswoman who had taken part in the 1952 Olympics), was the
niece of the ‘traitor’ General Jan Ingr was not allowed to stand in the way of
the couple being used to promote the image of sport as simultaneously Czech
nationalist and internationally socialist.23 The all-Sokol slet of 1948 was the last
to be held under the Communists. But Sokol itself – thanks largely to the
‘sensible’ views expressed by Hřebík – was not banned as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘reactionary’.
Instead, it was officially remembered as a ‘patriotic’ organization that
had ‘voluntarily’ dissolved itself into the unified Sports Union, helping to
underline the notion that Czech nationalism and Czech socialism were one,
and that both were best represented by the National Front as led by the
Czechoslovak Communist Party. The regime therefore felt perfectly able to
bring out an official commemorative album of the 1948 slet, with warm introductory
texts by Edvard Beneš, Klement Gottwald and the late Jan Masaryk;24
and to retain an honourable place in the Communist history books for
Miroslav Tyrš, one of Sokol’s two founders, who even had a sports medal
named after him. In case anyone had missed the point, a special postage
stamp, first issued in 1953, was circulated to proclaim the message (in Czech):
‘Sokol belongs to the working people.’25 Only after a decent interval of seven
years was an obvious socialist substitute, the mass gymnastic extravaganza
known as Spartakiáda, introduced to take the corporatist place that the Sokol slet
had held in the First Czechoslovak Republic.
The next challenge for the regime came with the death, on 3 September
1948, of Edvard Beneš. Although Beneš, a socialist and Czech nationalist who
was determined above all to rid the postwar state of its German population
and to place it under Soviet protection, had proved pliable to Communist
wishes since as early as 1943, in death his much longer and more intimate association
with T.G. Masaryk, the founding father of the state, and with the
steering of foreign and state policy during the First Czechoslovak Republic
was uppermost in everyone’s mind, making him an obvious figurehead around
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Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
184 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
which anti-Communist dissent could rally. A seventeen-year-old living in
Humpolec in Bohemia, upon hearing the news on the radio, confided to his
diary his fear that Czechoslovak liberty had died with its founder, and that
Communist ‘terror’ would now prevail.26 As shop and flat windows filled with
flags, portraits, photographs and busts of the former president, there was a
widespread sense that an era was ending.
Beneš’s body was shown the same respect as Jan Masaryk’s had been, and
was laid in state at the mausoleum at Vítkov where, by evening, the queues
of people wanting to pay their last respects had grown so long that it took
one group of mourners four hours to advance just 400 m (437 yards). As
midnight approached, when visits to the casket were supposed to end, SNB
vehicles that turned up to disperse the crowd were met with angry chants
such as ‘You ought to be ashamed to be paid for this!’ and ‘We want to see
President Beneš’, as well as the singing of the National Anthem and other
patriotic songs such as ‘Hej Slované’, ‘St Wenceslas’ and the Czech folk song
said to be T.G. Masaryk’s favourite: ‘Ach, synku, synku’ (‘Ah, my little son’).
The mood turned more defiant when about two thousand people gathered in
the city’s central boulevard, Wenceslas Square, where the appearance of SNB
officers led to the singing (to the tune of ‘Hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we
go’) of the jeering ‘Hey hou, trpaslíci jdou!’ (‘Hey ho, here come the dwarves!’).
The SNB dispersed the protestors with water cannon and tear gas. By
the time that Beneš’s state funeral ceremony was scheduled to begin, at
10 a.m. on the morning of 8 September 1948, People’s Militia had been
stationed throughout Prague city centre in such numbers that it seemed to
the schoolboy Jan Zábrana that the Communists must have been expecting a
full-blown counter-revolution.27 To the consternation of the Ministry of the
Interior, which took the trouble to solicit information from all twenty-four
regions into which the Bohemian Crown Lands were now divided, StB
officers reported sightings of posters and leaflets in cities as far afield as
Opava, Tábor, Uherské Hradiště, Ostrava and Český Těšín that, among
other crimes, accused the Communists of having murdered both Jan Masaryk
and Edvard Beneš.28
With the death of the two prime symbols of continuity between the First
(now officially ‘bourgeois’) Czechoslovak Republic and the postwar ‘People’s
Democratic Republic’, there was no longer any reason for the Communist
Party to restrain itself from publicly discrediting the National Socialist Party,
the party whose very existence challenged the KSČ’s claims to be the only
genuine mouthpiece for values that were at once socialist and Czech nationalist.
Josef Lesák, a National Socialist who had set up a youth organization to
rival the Communist-dominated Union of Youth (Svaz české mládeže or SČM )
and helped to organize the only notable anti-Communist demonstration to
take place during the February crisis – a student march held on 25 February
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Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 185
1948 – was arrested while trying to flee the country, on 4 June 1948.29
In
private, his captors offered him his freedom in exchange for going on state
radio to say that Petr Zenkl – who had by then sought political asylum in the
USA – had, in league with other National Socialist politicians, plotted to overthrow
the Communist regime. Because he refused, Lesák was to spend the
next twenty years in a series of prison and labour camps.30
Even without Lesák’s help, enough ‘evidence’ was gathered to prepare for
the first great Czech political trial to follow that of the Slovak Democratic Party
in May 1948. This was the show trial of a group of twelve politicians (mostly
National Socialist, but also including one former Communist and some Social
Democrats) who were supposed to have been led into treacherous, anti-state
activities by Milada Horáková, their National Socialist ‘ringleader’, whose real
crime had been to resign from parliament after the February Events. The trial,
which opened on 31 May 1950, was covered in a blaze of publicity and featured
sensational ‘confessions’, matched by public ‘demands’ by workers and peasants
that the guilty be given the ‘most severe sentences possible’. The trial
ended on 8 June 1950, with all the defendants found guilty of anti-state activity
in a judgement that ran to fifty typed pages.31 The most sensational of the four
death sentences was that of Milada Horáková herself. She was hanged at
Pankrác prison, where she had already served time under the Nazis, on 27 June
1950. The Horáková case led to 35 copycat trials in the regions, in which a
further 639 inconvenient politicians were condemned, 10 to death and a further
48 to life imprisonment.32
The Catholic Church, another obvious rival institution to the Communist
Party, offered a particularly delicate problem for the regime, since – as
Masaryk and Beneš had also found – the government could not afford to be
seen to be oppressing religious believers too crudely in what was, after all, an
overwhelmingly Catholic country: even most Communist officials were
baptized Catholics, and hundreds of thousands of card-carrying Communists
blithely continued to attend Mass, to have their children baptized and to get
married in church.33 Since the Communist Party was not primarily concerned
with private belief or discreet religious practice but rather with political
control, Gottwald was at first optimistic that the Church would see sense,
consent to cut its links with the Vatican and quietly submit to state control.
The early signs looked promising. By presiding over the first Communist
president’s inauguration after Victorious February, Archbishop Beran appeared
to have given the new regime the Church’s blessing. The ecclesiastical hierarchy
further accepted the imposition of a so-called ‘Roman Catholic Committee’ to
regulate Church affairs and showed every indication of being willing to endorse
government resolutions when required to do so. Slovak bishops met at Nitra in
August to publish a Pastoral Letter that helpfully emphasized the scriptural text
‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’.34 The
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186 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Ministry of the Interior identified about 180 ‘progressive priests’ ready to take
their instructions from the National Front government rather than their
bishops, and to spout Marxist jargon as and when required, in order to help
with the covert propaganda aim of drawing a sharp distinction in the public
mind between the Vatican-appointed hierarchy and the ‘patriotic masses’ of the
laity. So long as the Church authorities did not ‘abuse’ their positions, Gottwald
assured the conference of bishops held in Prague on 14–15 December 1948,
they would continue to be allowed to handle their own affairs.35
Communist–Catholic relations first soured, and then broke down altogether,
over three main areas of conflict. The first was the promotion by the
regime of ‘nationalist’ and ‘politically engaged’ (i.e. Marxist and pro-regime)
priests to positions of political importance, and particularly the elevation of
the especially aggressive Marxist Catholic priest Fr Josef Plojhar (who had
already been made leader of the Czechoslovak People’s Party) to the cabinet
as minister for health.36 The second area of conflict concerned whether or
not a Te Deum ought to have been sung at Gottwald’s inauguration as president,
a number of Communists, as well as Catholics, having been repelled by
the politico-religious combination. But the last, and most bitter, dispute
began with the discovery, on 22 March 1949, that a Conference of Bishops
was being bugged by the secret police. This was the final straw that led
Archbishop Beran to send Gottwald an angry memo in which he declared
that, in the circumstances, the Church could not declare its loyalty to the
government.37 Not content with rebuking the government in private, Beran
then went public, declaring that the government’s so-called Roman Catholic
Committee was causing divisions among Catholics and instructing the clergy
to ignore it.
The KSČ immediately struck back. When, the following week, Beran was
supposed to deliver his next sermon at St Vitus Cathedral on Hradčany, hecklers
from the People’s Militia prevented him from speaking. Upon returning
home, he was placed under house arrest, where he was to remain a prisoner
for several years. On 26 June, Beran managed to smuggle out a Pastoral Letter
that accused the government of persecuting the Church. The government
responded by banning Pastoral Letters, together with any assembly of
Catholic clergy that had not been given advance approval. On 3 July 1949, the
government announced that Slovak peasants were resisting government
legislation; this gave it the excuse, on 7 July 1949, to ban all religious communities
except those already under explicit state control. When the Vatican
stepped in, on 13 July, to excommunicate all members of the Communist
Party, together with their sympathizers, it was open warfare.38 Over the
course of 1949, against the background of an anticlerical campaign that
stressed the wartime atrocities of the Tiso regime, described the pope as
‘Hitler’s ally’ and linked expressions of Slovak and Polish devotion to an
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 187
international anti-socialist conspiracy,39
the KSČ proceeded to ban religious
publications, censor Catholic newspapers, outlaw any religious activity that
took place out of doors and take control of all seminaries, monasteries and
convents. These moves were then crowned by a new law, passed by the
National Assembly on 14 October 1949, which declared all Church matters
to be under the control of a special minister for Church affairs appointed by
the president.40
Although most obeyed the new law, some clergy and laity
refused, continuing to practise their faith in a rival ‘secret’ or underground
Church to the officially approved one.
An ambitious government campaign was then launched to discredit the
Catholic Church with the general public by demonstrating its supposed links,
through the Church hierarchy, with ‘treasonous imperialism dressed up in
Vatican propaganda’.41 Perhaps the most astonishing StB contribution to the
state’s anticlerical crusade was the elaborate hoax, later made famous by its
thinly disguised counterpart in Josef Škvorecký’s novel The Miracle Game,42 in
which the StB faked a ‘miracle’ in rural Bohemia in order sensationally to
‘unmask’ the fraud and blame it on the Church. At the nine o’clock Mass held
on 11 December 1949 at the parish church of Čihošt’, the crucifix on the altar
was seen to move at the precise moment when Fr Josef Toufar, the parish
priest, uttered the words ‘Our Saviour is here with us in this tabernacle’. As
news of the strange occurrence spread, prompting pilgrims, journalists, StB
agents and the papal nuncio to investigate, Fr Toufar was taken in for a month
of particularly sadistic StB interrogations which successfully persuaded him to
‘confess’ to homosexual offences with boys under the age of consent and to
having fraudulently staged the ‘miracle’ of the moving crucifix as ‘an antiCommunist
symbol, a symbol of the struggle against Marxism-Leninism’.43
The final stage of the secret-police farce was to force Toufar to take part
in a ‘reconstruction’ of his crimes which was to be filmed so that it could be
shown as ‘evidence’ in a forthcoming show trial whose purpose would be to
link the Czechoslovak ecclesiastical hierarchy with treasonous attempts to
overturn the Communist regime. Since Toufar inconveniently died, as a result
of StB torture, at the end of February, the filming, which went ahead in
March 1950, had to take place without his help.44 The result was a crude piece
of propaganda which showed the Čihošt’ crucifix spin with comic speed to
the western point of the compass and in which the wires installed by the StB
to move the crucifix were (as intended, since they were supposed to have
been installed by Fr Toufar) clearly visible. A running commentary explained
how the little village of Čihošt’ was just one small link in a chain that joined
a vast network of Vatican agents to a den of capitalist conspirators based in
Wall Street.45 In a gaffe that might have been prevented had Toufar not died
in police custody, the altar was covered in Easter flowers – despite the fact
that the filming was purported to have taken place during Advent.
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Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
188 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
However much suppressed mirth the government’s absurd propaganda film
may have caused many Catholic viewers, the StB’s ‘exposure’ of the ‘miracle’
of Čihošt’ served its political purpose. At the end of February 1950, Gottwald
was able to inform the Central Committee of the KSČ that the Catholic clergy,
in league with the Vatican, had organized an elaborate fraud to ‘destroy the
state’. This gave the government the necessary pretext to expel the papal
nuncio, who left Czechoslovakia on 18 March 1950, and to begin rounding up
members of the Church hierarchy and of religious orders.46 In a complicated
joint SNB/StB operation codenamed Operation K, 1,746 men and women
from a variety of Czech religious orders in Ústí nad Labem, Liberec, Hradec
Králové, Prague, České Budějovice, Plzeň, Karlovy Vary, Pardubice, Brno,
Jihlava, Gottwaldov (formerly known as Zlín), Olomouc and Ostrava were
seized from their monasteries or convents. They were arrested and placed in
StB prisons, forced-labour camps or the special ‘Concentration Cloister’ set up
at Želiv, where monastery buildings were turned into a mass prison camp. Ján
Chryzostom Korec, then a young Jesuit living in Trnava in Slovakia, remembered
how, on the night of 13 April 1950, men from the SNB, ŠtB and militia,
brandishing machine guns, stormed his monastery, loaded everyone onto
buses and deported them to a deserted twelfth-century monastery in the
remote town of Jasov. Since the police refused to say where they had gone, it
was at first assumed by their families – tellingly enough – that they were being
taken to the gas chambers.47 Further follow-up police strikes in the summer
and autumn of 1950 completed the operation, in which a total of some 6,000
monks and nuns were arrested and incarcerated.48
The final blow in the state’s campaign to neutralize the Church as a
possible centre of opposition to Communist rule came with a series of anticlerical
trials, the most sensational being the ‘Trial of Vatican Agents in
Czechoslovakia’ which was held in Prague, amid a blaze of publicity, between
27 November and 2 December 1950. The trial, in which Bishop Stanislav
Zela and a further eight defendants were sentenced to large fines and long
terms in prison, featured demagogic haranguings by collaborator priests,
most notably Fr Josef Plojhar, whose rantings as a witness in the open courtroom
were indistinguishable – both in style and in content – from those of
secular Marxist prosecutors. The largest of the copycat trials that immediately
followed in Slovakia – the show trial held in Bratislava between 10 and
15 January 1951 which included Archbishop Ján Vojtaššák and bishops
Michal Buzalka and Pavol Gojdič – did not receive as much media attention,
but resulted in harsher sentences, with fines of up to 500,000 crowns and life
sentences for all members of the Slovak ecclesiastical hierarchy.49 Even hardened
Communist Party members who were not directly involved could not
help noticing that there was something a little odd about the trials, privately
finding it strange – though they did not raise their voices in public – that
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 189
priests, nuns and bishops should ‘promptly confess to every crime with which
they were charged’ and ‘speak like lecturers on Marxism, formulating their
testimony in the purest Party jargon’.50
At the KSČ Ninth Party Congress, which was held on 25–29 May 1949,
chairman Klement Gottwald and secretary-general Rudolf Slánský summed
up the party’s principal tasks: to assume ‘the cultural and spiritual leadership
of the entire nation’, overcome the ‘survivals of bourgeois ideology’ and
restructure ‘society according to socialist principles’. An ambitious Five-Year
Economic Plan, to follow the National Front’s Two-Year Plan, approved by
the National Assembly in October 1948 and launched at the start of 1949,
was to reorient trade from West to East, while simultaneously focusing on the
industrialization of many rural areas.51 In order to create a suitably ‘socialist’
culture, it was decided to adopt the arguments contained in A.A. Zhdanov’s
influential Soviet text of 1934, ‘How to Be an Engineer of Human Souls’, as
official state policy on the role of art and culture in socialist society. This led
to a new wave of highly fêted sculpture, painting, drama, opera, poetry and
fiction, all in approved Socialist Realist style, whose purpose was avowedly
political and explicitly intended to educate the public in Marxist-Leninist
interpretations of the past as well as glimpses of the bright future that
was supposed to lie ahead with the final realization of the utopia of
‘Communism’. Even budding writers with the talent of a Milan Kundera got
their start by composing paeans of praise to Gottwald or Stalin. Favourite
subjects included heroic images of workers (especially coalminers, the ‘aristocracy’
of the working class); industrial landscapes (especially those
featuring dams or electrical plants); portraits of Young Pioneers, People’s
Militia and other officially approved Socialist heroes; and idealized portraits
of Communist martyrs, above all of Julius Fučík, the handsome young Czech
journalist who had died at the hands of the Gestapo.52 As for official
portraits of Communist statesmen, above all Comrades Gottwald and Stalin,
artists outdid themselves in their attempts adequately to elicit the politically
correct responses of love, gratitude, trust and awe towards those who had
freed them from bondage and were now leading them to the Promised Land.
When Heda Margolius, the wife of an important Communist official, was
careless enough to laugh at a new portrait of Stalin, complete with a violet
tractor set against fluffy pink clouds, for its ‘unbelievable kitsch’, she was
reported by a fellow worker. Only because the editor of the publishing house
where she worked happened – despite twenty years in the Party – to be a
‘rather sensible woman’ was the matter not taken further.53
Ten-minute state-sponsored newsreels, which preceded every film shown
in public cinemas from 1945 right up to 1989, kept up a steady barrage
of ‘good news’: how the latest Soviet agricultural methods and industrial
techniques were revolutionizing the economy; how new electrical plants were
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190 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
bringing light even to the most backward regions of Slovakia; how the ‘revanchist’
plots of the West Germans, portrayed as warmongering Nazis, had yet
again been uncovered and disarmed; how the peace-loving citizens of the
People’s Democratic Republic of Germany were enthusiastically ‘building
socialism’; how everything – from sporting triumphs and folklore festivals
to art exhibitions and classical concerts (to say nothing of overtly political
occasions such as the annual May Day, Victorious February and Great
October Revolution celebrations) – demonstrated the superiority of the
socialist system to that of the capitalist West.54 While something like a million
and a half books were taken off library shelves to be placed on a special index
of prohibited books (whose titles can today be seen in the Klementinum
Catalogue of Formerly Prohibited Literature), newly printed accounts of the
past hammered home the lesson that, after centuries of human struggle to
achieve socialism – as evidenced by the Hussite and French revolutions,
together with every other historical movement that could conceivably be
presented as radical, reformist or progressive – the first real breakthrough
had been achieved by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It was this uniquely
successful experiment which, having triumphantly defeated Nazism along the
way, had begun to spread its benefits to the rest of the world: to Eastern
Europe, to North Korea, to China and to all the other countries that, one by
one, were choosing to join the international family of socialist nations.
In the spring of 1950, when East–West tensions were reaching new
heights with the Berlin blockade and the start of the Korean War, a huge antiAmerican
campaign was launched. Posters and political cartoons featured
Wall Street capitalists and US generals helping the West German ‘Nazis’ and
imposing their will on the United Nations, while simultaneously torturing
their own Black minority and ruthlessly exploiting labour at home.55 Posters,
newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and official weekly newsreels, together
with the issuing of gasmasks and holding of frequent air-raid drills, helped
to keep fear of the Western imperialists at fever pitch and to minimize
complaints about continued rationing. One of the unexpected side effects
created by anti-Western and anti-imperialist campaigns was the trouble
caused to SNB and StB officers in the border regions, where they found themselves
repeatedly having to deal with attempts by citizens living along the
frontiers with Austria, Poland or Hungary to flee inland out of fear that they
would find themselves on the frontline when the imminently expected Third
World War broke out. As early as September 1948, the problem was already
so acute that the Ministry of the Interior realized that it would have to review
the whole question of the security of the country’s borders which, because
of the increased number of fugitives from the regime, were simultaneously
having to be reinforced with watchtowers, barbed wire, minefields and all the
familiar paraphernalia associated with the building of the Iron Curtain.56
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Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 191
Encouraging Czechoslovak citizens to view the West with fear and hostility
had obvious advantages in making citizens feel dependent for their safety on
the state. It also made it possible to blame any economic misfortune – from
a bad harvest to a village fire – not on mere accident or the short-sightedness
of the Five-Year Plan, but rather on the evil cunning of imperialist agents
who, if you believed the government propaganda, were lurking behind every
bush. It was in this climate that a government campaign to blame ruined
potato crops on the mandelinka or Colorado beetle (presumably a selfconscious
revival of a similar scare of 1939) was launched in 1950, stimulating
fears of pestilence at just about the same time that US planes were
dropping anti-Communist leaflets in the border regions of the country.57 The
atmosphere of war hysteria, justifying the need for constant vigilance, was
further maintained by the launching of a series of popular and well-made
feature films, of which Josef Mach’s Akce B (Operation B), a Boy’s Own-style
adventure story in which the SNB and Czechoslovak army triumphantly
defeat a reactionary group of bandits (composed of an unsavoury blend of
Vatican agents, international spies and Banderovci traitors) hiding out in the
wilds of Slovakia is probably the best-known example.58 Positive propaganda
about the benefits of socialism and friendship with the Soviet Union was left
to the enthusiastic messages on display in Communist Party glass-encased
wooden notice boards which were to be found in every neighbourhood and
village; to the constant emphasis on the peace-loving nature of the Slav and
socialist worlds as opposed to West Germany and the warmongering West;
and also to light comedy films such as Bylo to v máji (It Was in May), whose
moral appeared to be that trusting ‘politically engaged’ (i.e. Communist)
workers to lead society ‘forwards’ was the best guarantee of the nation’s
future security, happiness and fulfilment.59
Large industrial firms could be nationalized at the stroke of a pen, but the
hoped-for collectivization of agriculture lagged far behind, small landowners,
farmers and better-off peasants proving reluctant to join cooperative farms.
Pressure therefore began to be applied systematically. At first, the government
relied mostly on poster and newsreel campaigns to advertise the alleged
benefits of cooperative farms, which were portrayed as infinitely more efficient
and up-to-date than their ‘capitalist’ counterparts, while simultaneously
presenting private ownership as greedy, selfish and inefficient. Since months
of this approach passed without much discernible effect, and from 1 January
1949 there was the Five-Year Plan to think of, added muscle was lent to
the cause. Tractors and farm machinery began to be requisitioned by the
government on the slightest pretext and handed over to rival agricultural
cooperatives in the same village; private farms were given quotas that were
increasingly impossible to fulfil; the children of stubborn peasants were
refused permission to attend gymnázia (prestigious high schools) or to go to
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192 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
university. Finally, farmers and peasants who continued to be uncooperative
were branded in local newspapers as ‘kulaks’, a Russian term denoting ‘tightfisted’
independent farmers, famously considered by Stalin the ‘class enemy’
of poorer peasants. They were then made the object of angry factory-floor
discussions, charged with criminal acts of subversion, hauled before local
courts and sentenced to terms in prison, after which their property could be
confiscated by the state and handed over to a ‘collective’ (i.e. state) farm.
Raimund Musil, whose father ran a medium-sized farm in Dědina that was
already struggling to keep up with the quotas of milk, meat and poultry
demanded by the government, finally gave the authorities an excuse to confiscate
the family property altogether when he was found to be hiding some
objectionable leaflets for his local branch of Sokol. The StB came after
midnight, waking everyone up, and took him away for questioning. He was
next seen in a courtroom in Brno as one of a large number of ‘treasonous
kulaks’ to be tried against the usual background of local factory workers’ petitions
and resolutions that he be given ‘the severest punishment’ for his
‘crimes’ against the state. In the end, Musil’s father was not sentenced to
death, but to a large fine, the confiscation of his family’s property, the
removal of his rights as a citizen and sixteen years in prison. The conditions
at Bory prison, on the outskirts of Plzeň, were so bad that he returned home
after serving less than two years of his sentence: in a coffin. The whole family
was forcibly moved out of the village around Christmas 1952.60
In the especially sensitive matter of the Czechoslovak army, although the
officer class had been thoroughly purged by 1949 there were still the troops
to consider. Since the army was largely made up of draftees called up for
National Service, Communist Party, National Front and Union of Youth
(ČSM) organizations were enlisted to write political assessments of each
recruit for scrutiny by the relevant local branch of the StB. With the beginning
of the Korean War in 1950 and the consequent increase in Cold War
tensions, the importance of a politically reliable army came to seem paramount.
Ludvík Svoboda, a wartime hero, was relieved of his duties as
minister of defence in March 1950 and put in charge of sport instead; at the
end of 1951 he was again removed from his post, this time to spend a few
months in prison before being sent to work on a collective farm. The new
minister of defence was Alexej Čepička, Gottwald’s son-in-law and an ardent
prewar Communist who had survived Nazi concentration camps to be
appointed minister of domestic trade in 1947 and minister of justice in 1948.
Under Čepička, whose brief was to reform the army in line with the wartime
Soviet-Czechoslovak agreements signed by Beneš, it was decided in
September 1950 to create a special new category, ‘Category E’, for army
recruits deemed ‘politically unreliable’, who were automatically to be placed
in special units called pomocné technické prapory (auxiliary technical battalions).
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 193
These were the infamous pétépáci (PTPs) or ‘Black Barons’, recruits who were
not allowed to take part in weapons training or to mix with other soldiers, but
who were instead isolated in special camps and used for hard labour.61 From
1 October 1950, each of the ninety thousand recruits called up for National
Service had to fill out a detailed questionnaire whose answers were checked
according to a revised list of eleven criteria for identifying the ‘politically
unreliable’. All those who had previously been tried for anti-state offences
(whether under the 1923 or the 1948 laws for the Defence of the Republic)
were automatically to be placed in Category E. So were factory owners,
employers with more than ten employees, anyone who earned more than
10,000 crowns per month from property or other investments, peasants who
owned more than 30 hectares (74 acres) of arable land, people who in the
past had been removed from public positions by Action Committees, and
students who had been expelled either from school or from university.62
Although the number of Category E soldiers was at first too low to enable
the army to fulfil its coal-mining and road-building obligation to the FiveYear
Plan, by the end of 1950 army officers were taking their ‘political duties’
seriously enough so that, out of an intake of 83,000 fresh recruits to the
army, 5,102 were assigned to the PTP and a further 1,900 marked down for
further investigation; by making up numbers with priests, monks and seminarians,
who were placed in a special road construction unit, the PTP finally
consisted of 9,990 men, of whom the vast majority, some 8,000, were
Category E prisoners, exactly the number estimated to be necessary by the
army to carry out its required projects.63
PTP units were scattered around the country, mostly in Bohemia and the
border regions. In theory, the men were supposed to have some free time,
tolerable living conditions, and to attend ‘re-education’ courses in MarxismLeninism
so that they could be rehabilitated and eventually reintegrated into
society. In practice, it was common for pétépáci to be worked well over the
regulation daily eight hours, following night duty with a day shift; to be
housed in makeshift tents or primitive barracks without hot water or even
glass in the windows; or to find that their ‘leisure’ time consisted solely
of being made to perform callisthenics or sing socialist songs.64 Formal
re-education classes turned out to be a joke, consisting of parroting answers
in unison for the benefit of teachers who, according to legend, were in some
cases themselves so poorly educated that one mysteriously persisted in calling
Lenin ‘the fifth of January’, apparently under the delusion that that was what
the initials ‘V.I.’ stood for in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s name.65
From September 1949, even those Communist Party members who had
zealously denounced and reported others began to feel at risk. This time, the
initial pressure came not from the KSČ leadership so much as from ‘fraternal’
Communist parties in the neighbouring People’s Democratic Republics, which
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194 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
were following the first major postwar trial in a Central European state of a
Communist Party official: the trial in Budapest of László Rajk, the Hungarian
foreign minister, for being a ‘Titoist agent’. Although there was an initial
reluctance on the part of the KSČ to seek the ‘enemy within’, the publicity
given to the Rajk trial, together with ‘evidence’ read out in court that pointed
the finger at Czechoslovakia, meant that it became increasingly difficult
for the KSČ to ignore. Most of the evidence concerning Czechoslovak
Communists, many of whom were explicitly named in the trial proceedings,
came from the testimony of Noel Field, a US national who, although cast in
the role of CIA agent, had in fact worked for the NKVD (the People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the USSR’s public and secret police
organization). Other members of his family also had links either with
Czechoslovak or German Communists, Soviet intelligence or both.66 In the
spring and summer of 1949, as secret preparations for the Rajk trial were
being made, the Fields, one by one, disappeared. Noel Field was last seen
leaving the Palace Hotel in Prague with two men in May, though the bill for
his vacant hotel room continued mysteriously to be paid; his brother,
Hermann Field, disappeared on a flight from Warsaw to Prague in August;
Herta Field, who had gone out to Prague to look for her missing husband and
brother-in-law, herself disappeared from the Palace Hotel a few days later.
Even Erika Glaser, a girl the Fields had helped to escape from postwar
Germany and whom they referred to as their ‘adopted daughter’, vanished
without trace after boarding the subway between West and East Berlin a year
later, in August 1950.67
From the autumn of 1949, when their testimonies began to be heard in the
Budapest courtroom, part of the Field family mystery started to be solved. The
Fields, it turned out, had been arrested in Prague on the recommendation
of the Hungarian secret service, which was in turn being helped by Soviet
advisors. Also on trial in Budapest was Gejza Pavlík, a prominent Slovak
Communist who had worked with Noel Field in Switzerland and afterwards
become head of the Czechoslovak Travel Bureau, Čedok, and whom the
Hungarian authorities were claiming as the link between Field and a Hungarian
Trotskyist group.68 Among those named in depositions by Noel Field, Gejza
Pavlík and others, all of whom were held in Hungarian secret-police cells, were
some sixty prominent Czechoslovak Communists, including Otto Šling, the
regional party secretary in Brno; Vladimír Clementis, minister of foreign affairs
and a leading Slovak Communist; Vilém Nový, the editor of the Communist
Party daily Rudé právo; Václav Nosek, minister of the interior since 1945;
Richard Slánský, a diplomat and the brother of KSČ secretary-general Rudolf
Slánský; and Evžen Löbl, deputy minister for foreign trade.69
As Evžen Löbl (Eugene Loebl) later recalled, one day in September 1949
he was summoned before the KSČ Central Committee. He was told that he
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 195
was to be questioned, and that his future would depend upon his cooperation
in telling the ‘unadulterated truth without reservations’. As an obedient
Communist, he scrupulously completed his résumé in a spirit of self-criticism
which ‘made no secret’ of his mistakes and, if anything, presented his own
actions and motives ‘in too bad, rather than too good a light’. That same
evening, Löbl was transferred to an improvised cell in the Central Committee
building to complete his task. The next day, his interrogators took note of the
fact that he ‘was not of working class family’ and that he had spent time in
the West and had dealings with Western journalists, politicians and economists.
To his surprise, he was then informed that the party was releasing him
so that he could continue in his duties at the Foreign Office, but that he was
not to leave Prague or to inform anyone about what had happened, on pain
of expulsion from the party and immediate arrest.70
Löbl claims to have kept his mouth firmly shut, but a couple of months
later a plainclothes StB officer entered his flat and delivered a summons from
Minister of the Interior Nosek. Instead of being taken to Nosek (who was by
then himself under suspicion), he was driven in the direction of Prague’s
Ruzyně airport and led to a large building where a uniformed StB officer
arrested him. He was put in prison clothes and left entirely alone for four
days. On the fifth day, he was interrogated by StB officers Vladimír Kohoutek
and Bohumil Doubek. Since Löbl initially failed either to admit to any wrongdoing
or to implicate others, he was subjected to ‘hard treatment’. This meant
being interrogated on average fourteen times a day; dragged out of sleep
thirty or forty times a night; kept in continual hunger; and not allowed to sit
down, even when eating or using the toilet. Often he was forced to spend the
whole day standing with his face to the wall. The physical effects of not being
able to sit down included such painful swelling to his feet ‘that washing
became torture and every step hurt’. To these physical sufferings was added
the psychological distress of being kept in a constant state of tension,
shouted at, threatened, insulted and kept within earshot of the interrogation
room, where the cries and weeping of other prisoners, together with the
bellowing of interrogators, could be plainly heard. Several times he was
woken and led, blindfolded, to a basement room where he was made to listen
to telephone discussions of what turned out to be bogus plans for his execution
on the grounds that feeding him had become too great an expense, or
that his interrogators’ time was being wasted. Careful measures, he noticed,
had been taken to prevent the possibility of suicide: the ‘handkerchiefs’
issued were of only 13 sq cm (2 sq inches) and glass windows were situated
well beyond the reach of prisoners.71
After several months of this treatment, Löbl willingly ‘confessed to every
conceivable crime’ without so much as toying with the idea of later retracting
his statements in an open courtroom. From the point when he made his full
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196 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
‘confession’ (to crimes that he had not committed), he was permitted to read
and to accept parcels from his wife, and found that Kohoutek, his principal
tormentor, suddenly became ‘friendly and chatty’ with him. Thanks to what
was officially termed Löbl’s ‘responsible’ attitude towards ‘helping’ his interrogators,
the original list of suspects, as initially identified by Noel Field in
similar circumstances in Hungary, was considerably enlarged.72
Accounts left by Party members who survived the ordeals of arrest,
imprisonment and trial in 1950s Czechoslovakia (or by the widows of those
who did not) have a depressing predictability and sameness about them.
Suspects first became aware that they were being followed; then that their
homes were bugged and their telephones tapped; then that they were in some
indefinable way being held at arm’s length and watched by their colleagues
and superiors with suspicion. Next they were demoted or unexpectedly
moved from influential positions. Only then did the StB come to take them
away. Victims typically responded to being arrested with incredulity and
indignation, demanding to be allowed to speak to President Gottwald,
Secretary-General Slánský or to other powerful people in the party. When
this response got them nowhere, they clung to the belief that there had been
some terrible mistake which the party, in its wisdom, would eventually clear
up. Left alone in solitary confinement for hours, days or even weeks, they
discovered the prison rules and conventions by being shouted at. They were
not to use their names, but only their prison numbers; the dazzling light in
their cells would never be turned off; they could not place their hands under
their blanket, however cold the weather; nothing could be kept in their cell
except a tiny scrap of material, a dozen centimetres or a few inches square,
officially called a ‘handkerchief’; even combs and toothbrushes had to be
specially requested and returned immediately after use. Prisoners were
watched, day and night, by a series of StB prison staff through the peephole
that was to be found at eye level in each cell door.
For most prisoners, the first interrogation, to which they were always
brought blindfolded and disoriented, gave a ray of false hope. After solitary
confinement, it was a relief simply to speak with another human being and
to be in the comparatively normal environment of a prison office, with desk,
chairs, carpet, typewriter and reassuringly familiar portraits of Stalin and
Gottwald. Most looked forward to the opportunity to explain their innocence,
while the first questions asked – name, occupation, place of birth – were
soothing in their very banality. Only once prisoners found – with a nasty
shock – that the questions would be repeated, and the interrogations continue,
until the answers finally conformed to those the interrogators wished to hear,
did they begin to realize the complete hopelessness of their position.73
The immediate impulse for the KSČ to hold what turned out to be the
most extensive and elaborate Communist show trial outside the Soviet Union
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 197
came from the first secretary of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, who warned
Gottwald at the beginning of September 1949 that when the forthcoming
Rajk trial opened, it would include dozens of Czechoslovak names. Gottwald,
who had already helped to ensure that the Field brothers were extradited to
Hungary, again responded helpfully, by ensuring that some seventeen
suspects, including Löbl, were immediately arrested and that veterans from
the Spanish Civil War, Yugoslav Partisans, Communists who had spent the
war in London and other ‘anti-Party elements’ were placed under surveillance.
President Gottwald and KSČ secretary-general Slánský, eager to curry
favour with Moscow and anxious not to put a foot wrong, further requested
that the Soviet Union send ‘advisors’ to coach them on how to proceed.74
Although all seventeen initial Communist Party suspects either committed
suicide or were brought to trial, the main political purpose for which the
secret-police apparatus was being expanded – to uncover evidence of a
conspiracy in the highest echelons of the party – had not yet been achieved.
This failure on the part of the KSČ leadership seemed all the more suspect
given Czechoslovakia’s history. Not only had Czechoslovakia been created in
the image of its ‘bourgeois’ and ‘imperialist’ allies, France, Britain and the
United States; but a good proportion of the Communist Party leadership had
spent the war in Britain, where they had worked closely with the Beneš
government. After the war, the KSČ had preached the ‘Titoist’ notion of a
distinct ‘Czechoslovak road to socialism’; had voted to accept Marshall Aid
before being rebuked for so doing by Moscow; and had been one of the first
states to follow the Soviet Union in recognizing Israel, which by 1949 had
disappointed Soviet hopes by allying itself instead with the United States. To
Stalinists everywhere, it was simply inconceivable that Czechoslovakia could
be immune from Titoist intrigue and Western infiltration when even countries
that had been thoroughly purged during occupation by the Red Army
were proving compromised.
Among the first in the Czechoslovak Communist Party to see the need for
radical action was the secretary-general of the KSČ, Rudolf Slánský. Slánský
had little to fear from his own past since – unlike his closest comrade, Klement
Gottwald, who had repeatedly promised that Czechoslovakia would follow
its ‘own road’ to socialism – he had long been renowned for his disciplined
Stalinism and unquestioned loyalty to the Soviet Union. After a Comintern
meeting in November 1949 characterized by an atmosphere of near-hysterical
hate and fear and at which a second condemnation of the Communist Party
of Yugoslavia was passed, it was becoming clear that any Communist parties
that did not join in the wholehearted condemnation of even the slightest
deviation from current Stalinist orthodoxy would themselves be suspect. At a
speech to KSČ activists held in Prague on 7 December 1949, Slánský insisted
that enemy agents must also have infiltrated their own ranks and called on the
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198 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
party faithful to show the utmost vigilance to ‘unmask’ the ‘enemies in our
own ranks, for they are the most dangerous enemies’.75 Impatient with the
Ministry of the Interior’s apparent slowness in coming up with evidence of a
conspiracy large and important enough to satisfy the rest of the socialist bloc,
from mid-1949, Slánský began routinely to go over Nosek’s head, giving
instructions to StB agents directly from party headquarters. Not to be outmanoeuvred,
in 1950 Gottwald insisted on taking direct responsibility
for national security.
Just as wartime anti-Semitic and postwar anti-German legislation,
parcelled out to rival, and sometimes overlapping, regional, district and
national authorities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, had tended constantly
to escalate in volume and intensity, so the confusion of party and state
competencies in the late 1940s and early 1950s began to spiral out of control.
The group that had taken charge of Löbl, for example, was made up of a
mixture of StB officers from the Ministry of the Interior and officials from
Party Central Office, renamed Sector IIa and organized into special sections
to deal with ‘Trotskyites’, members of International Brigades and ‘bourgeois
nationalists’ (i.e. Slovak Communists). In Slovakia itself, an equivalent department
was established by the Ministry of the Interior, but supervised by KSS
secretary-general Štefan Baštovanský and party chairman Viliam Široký,
whose first task was to collect information on leading Slovak Communists.
In May 1950, the StB broke away from the Ministry of the Interior to form
its own, independent Ministry of National Security. Meanwhile, staff at the
Party Control Commission, equally eager to find ‘the Czechoslovak Rajk’,
began to make use of confidential reports at their disposal to find further
suspects, whom they then took it upon themselves to interrogate or place
under surveillance. Before long, the Commission had set up its own plants
in the StB to see whether the National Security office itself might not be
covering up for enemies within the party. Even regional and district party
committees began to set up their own committees of investigation, reminiscent
of the immediate postwar people’s tribunals and known in the districts
as the ‘threes’, because they were made up of the district party security secretary
and district SNB and StB chiefs, and in the regions, where they were
joined by the regional public prosecutor and another official, as the ‘fives’.76
In 1950, therefore, the same year that army reforms, together with the
Milada Horáková, ‘Vatican Agent’ and thousands of less high-profile political
show trials were spreading terror throughout Czechoslovak society, an
equally fervent hunt was simultaneously being carried out within the Ministry
of the Interior, the Department of National Security and the various police
forces, as well as in all of the KSČ and KSS national, district and regional
committees to find and expose the ‘enemy within’ the Communist Party. As
each new prisoner was interrogated, more names were added to the list of
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 199
suspects; as each interrogation group competed with the others to ‘unmask’
the plot (whose existence no one appears any longer to have doubted), suspicion
fell not only on those who had already been arrested or placed under
surveillance, but also on those working in rival departments, leading to a
spiral of denunciations, arrests and confessions. But no matter how many
Communists had already been forced to ‘confess’, the very logic of the search
meant that the witch-hunt within the Communist Party could not be brought
to a close until the ‘Czechoslovak Rajk’ had been found, condemned and
executed. Only then could the socialist world be satisfied that Czechoslovakia
had been ‘purged’ in the same way as the other People’s Democracies.
The first likely candidate to provide a convenient scapegoat, and whose
name had helpfully been suggested by Hungarian security, was the prominent
Slovak Communist Vladimír Clementis. Since Clementis had disapproved
publicly of the Soviet-German Pact of 1939, he could be presented as antiSoviet;
since he was Slovak, he could be accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’;
because he was minister of foreign affairs, he could be seen to resemble Rajk
and be suspected of both ‘Titoism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Unlike Gustáv
Husák, who was more vulnerable to the charge of ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalism’
but who actually refused, while in the custody of the secret police, to
‘help the Party’ by confessing, Clementis proved pliable. As a Slovak who
could be used to link Western imperialist plots simultaneously with Edvard
Beneš, ‘Hlinka fascists’ and ‘our Jewish bourgeois nationalist circles’, he was
invaluable.77 Foreign Minister Clementis was arrested on 27 January 1951 in
a special operation, codenamed ‘Operation Stones’, in which an entire replica
of the border with West Germany was set up within a few kilometres of the
actual border, complete with barbed wire, huts and StB agents impersonating
border guards, so that – in a touch that was said to have appealed to
Gottwald’s sense of humour – the foreign minister could appear to have been
caught in the act of attempting to defect to the West.78
Another possible scapegoat was Otto Šling, chief secretary of the
Regional Committee of the KSČ in Brno, who had already been arrested on
6 October 1950, sparked by the sudden discovery by the security services of
a letter purported to have been sent to Šling by Emanuel Voska, the head of
a Czechoslovak spy ring based in the United States. The next month, the case
was discussed by the Regional Party Committee in Brno, under the watchful
eye of delegates from Prague, who agreed to expel Šling from the party and
to enforce a radical change in the district party leadership. Within hours of
the resolution, the StB had made its first arrests and launched an extensive
hunt throughout Moravia for the rest of ‘the Šling leadership’. By January
1951, some six hundred personal dossiers had been examined and twenty or
more arrests made, mostly of Communists in the Brno region. By February,
the number of arrests had risen to about fifty, and included a Slovak group,
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200 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
party officials from other regions who (like Šling) were of Jewish background
and even top security men like deputy minister of national defence Bedřich
Reicin and deputy minister of national security Karel Šváb. A special prison
had to be set up at Koloděj House near Prague to deal with the sudden intake
of prisoners. Interrogations at Koloděj, which were more sadistic and less
controlled than those that had become routine at Ruzyně and Pankrác, also
brought about the required results: Václav Kopecký was able to report to the
KSČ Central Committee the following month that Šling, probably in league
with Clementis, had conspired to depose KSČ secretary-general Slánský and
assassinate President Gottwald; other prisoners further suggested that he had
wanted to oust Antonín Novotný from his position as party secretary in
Prague. The sensational ‘revelations’ became so widely publicized that a new
term entered the language: ‘Šlingism’, meaning a combination of espionage,
sabotage and treachery.79
As the security services worked overtime to extract the requisite ‘detailed
confessions’ to manufacture a case against a band of conspirators centred
around Šling, StB interrogators claimed to be struck by how often the name
of KSČ secretary-general Rudolf Slánský – another Stalinist of Jewish background
– came up during questioning. They began to toy with an idea so bold
that, if realized, could give the secretary-general a taste of his own medicine
and simultaneously prevent Czechoslovakia from ever again being accused of
being ‘soft’ on its own party leadership. Since even the most brutal interrogation
methods of scores of prisoners – from former StB officers to the highest
party officials – had yet to produce concrete evidence of an actual conspiracy,
the StB – and, through it, the party leadership – came to the conclusion that
the real evil genius must be someone even higher up in the party hierarchy.80
Slánský, although he had recently been awarded the highest honour in the
land – the Order of Klement Gottwald for the Building of Socialism – was
therefore, on 6 September 1951, removed from his post as secretary-general
of the KSČ. Three days later, the security services informed President
Gottwald that they had intercepted a letter – again presumed to have been
sent by the Voska group – that warned someone referred to only as ‘the Great
Crossing Sweeper’ that he was in imminent danger of arrest, but could be
helped to defect. By 23 November 1951, Gottwald was apparently persuaded
that the letter must have been intended for Slánský (it now appears that it
was a provocation by the CIA).81
The Slánskýs were arrested the same night
on their way home from a dinner party thrown by the Zápotockýs, who
obediently phoned the StB at the moment their distinguished guests
left the party. Slánský, who endured the usual ‘hard treatment’ at Ruzyně
for nearly two months, proved a hard nut to crack. But at the end of
January 1952, after he had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by hanging
himself with the alarm cord attached to his window, he confessed to the
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 201
existence of a conspiratorial ‘centre’ and, thereafter, to anything else that was
required of him.82
The next stage of the proceedings was for all the testimonies that had been
so painstakingly extracted from hundreds of ‘witnesses’ and ‘culprits’ over
the course of two years to be readjusted and realigned to fit the new political
requirements: that it was no longer Clementis or Šling, but rather Slánský,
who had been ‘unmasked’ as the ‘real’ Rajk. Whereas the Slovak Clementis
and regional leader Šling had been vulnerable to accusations of ‘bourgeois
nationalism’ of a ‘Titoist’ kind, Slánský – although a Bohemian Czech – was
of Jewish background. This opened the way for accusations of ‘Zionism’ and
‘cosmopolitanism’ to be added to the usual crimes of sabotage, espionage,
Titoism and Trotskyism. Judaism could also provide the thread to link a large
number of the ‘conspirators’ together, win favour in Moscow, advertise the
‘correct’ attitude to be adopted towards the state of Israel, and, relying on the
strength of popular anti-Semitism, ensure that the members of the ‘conspiratorial
centre’ would elicit no pity. Finally, focusing on the Jewish backgrounds
of those who were now to be cast as the eleven leading members of
a ‘conspiratorial centre’ led by Rudolf Slánský helped to deflect attention
from the impeccably Czech and Aryan, but politically compromised,
Gottwald, who took care to ensure that the further accusation – that Slánský
had propagated ‘a Czechoslovak road to socialism’ – was deleted from the
final text of the indictment.83 As Hannah Schling has found, in Gottwald’s
speech to the Central Committee conference of September 1951, which was
afterwards sent to all party members in pamphlet form, he referred to the
conspirators as largely made up of those who ‘did not grow from the roots
of our country and our Party, of whom the majority belonged to a different
type, which at the January conference of the Central Committee of the Party
I called cosmopolitans’.84 Like many other Communists, Rudolf and Heda
Margolius initially felt only relief when they heard of Slánský’s arrest,
assuming that the purge which Slánský had helped to launch would now be
brought to an end. Instead, the arrests escalated, focusing on Jews. One of
those to be arrested in this next purge of high Communist officials was the
deputy minister of foreign trade: Margolius himself.85 Although unable to
protect the KSČ from having to go through the same terrible ordeal as the
other People’s Democracies, Gottwald probably tried to spare his own kith
and kin by offering, wherever possible, Jewish or Slovak (rather than Gentile
and Czech-speaking) Communists in their stead.
On 20 November 1952, the ‘Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State
Conspiratorial Centre headed by Rudolf Slánský’ opened as a grand piece of
political theatre at the State Court in Prague. Fourteen leading Communists
(Slánský, Löbl, Šling, Clementis, Margolius, London, Reicin, Šváb, Hajdů,
Fischl, Geminder, Frejka, Frank and Simon), eleven of whom were explicitly
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202 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
described as being ‘of Jewish origin’, were accused of being ‘TrotskyiteTitoist,
Zionist and bourgeois nationalist traitors’ and ‘enemies of the
Czechoslovak people’, who – in the pay of ‘the US imperialists’ and under
‘the direction of Western espionage agencies’ – had conspired to create ‘an
anti-state conspiratorial centre’ to ‘undermine the people’s democratic
regime, frustrate the building of socialism, damage the national economy,
carry out espionage activity’ and ‘weaken the unity of the Czechoslovak
people and the Republic’s defensive capacity’ in order to ‘tear the country
away from its close alliance and friendship with the Soviet Union, liquidate
the Czechoslovak people’s democratic regime, restore capitalism and return
the Republic to the imperialist camp and destroy its national sovereignty and
independence’.86 Only Clementis, as token Slovak, confessed to taking part
in a ‘subversive group of Slovak bourgeois nationalists’ that had tried ‘to
separate the development of Slovakia from the development of the state as
a whole, thus strengthening reaction and hindering the progress of socialism
and the development of the people’s democratic order’.87
The courtroom was packed with ministers, factory delegates and plainclothes
StB officers; the families of the accused – some of whom might not
have shown proper satisfaction at the ‘unmasking’ of the traitors88 – had to
find out the verdicts from radio and newspaper reports. Not only the defendants
and witnesses, who had learned their testimony word for word, but
even the lawyers and the public prosecutor, Josef Urválek, had their lines
written for them by the StB, who drafted and redrafted the script until it met
with the full approval of the party leadership. The trial, which lasted a week,
was held in a blaze of publicity, backed by a strongly anti-Semitic campaign
which featured Slánský as a Judas, a rat or an anti-Semitic caricature.89 The
campaign inspired thousands of vindictive letters and angry resolutions from
factory workers, groups of schoolchildren Pioneers (a sort of Communist
equivalent of Boy and Girl Scouts) and agricultural cooperatives, in addition
to the inevitable regional and district party resolutions. Gottwald was widely
praised for his manliness, discipline and honour in not sparing even his
closest associate and friend, while the nation was treated to the daily sensation
of new ‘revelations’ in the press, together with live broadcasts of the
entire proceedings, blared out over the loudspeaker systems on factory floors
and in public places around the country. Inevitably, all fourteen defendants
were found guilty of multiple charges of high treason, espionage, sabotage
and military treason. Three – Evžen Löbl, Artur London and Vavro Hajdů –
were sentenced to life imprisonment; the remaining eleven were sentenced to
death on 27 November and executed at Pankrác prison on 3 December 1952.
The entire transcript of the trial was then edited by the Ministry of Justice
and published by Orbis, the state publisher, as a fat brown paperback which
could be bought by anyone for 45 crowns.90
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 203
The Slánský and related show trials of the early 1950s were not of a fundamentally
different kind from the tens of thousands of other, far more obscure
Czechoslovak political trials – of National Socialists, Slovak Democrats, priests,
nuns, monks, scout leaders, members of Sokol, army recruits, ‘kulaks’ and
countless other ‘class enemies’, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of
alleged ‘traitors’, wartime ‘collaborators’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘black marketeers’ –
that preceded or accompanied this most sensational of trials. But there were
two important differences. Unlike the other trials, which were a purely
Czechoslovak affair, the quest for ‘the Czechoslovak Rajk’ was prompted by
‘fraternal’ pressure from other socialist countries, particularly Hungary, and
included some direct Soviet involvement. Pressure and advice were not,
however, the same thing as compulsion; and while contemporary Hungarian
and East German political trials bore an uncanny resemblance to the
Czechoslovak ones, the Polish Communist Party appears to have managed
successfully to ignore the hints and requests from Moscow to conform.
In later years, the Slánský trial and related purges and denunciations were
taken by Czechoslovak Communists themselves as a matter for ‘self-criticism’
and explained away as a symptom of the ‘personality cult’ that a mistaken
reliance upon Stalin was supposed to have provoked. Upon closer inspection,
this turns out not to have been so much a ‘self-criticism’ as an avoidance of
the main point and a passing of the buck to other Communists – whether
rivals within the party or safely distant foreign comrades – who were held
individually responsible for the torture, forced confessions and fabrications
of evidence that had characterized the trials. At no point were the many thousands
of other show trials publicly explained or regretted. For the first time
since February 1948, substantial numbers of Communist Party members
were included among the aggrieved and discontented with the regime at
home. By blaming the obvious miscarriages of justice on the Soviet authorities,
they were able to leave their underlying faith in the righteousness of
Czechoslovak socialism intact.
On 5 March 1953, Stalin died. In Prague, Wenceslas Square filled to
capacity with mourners dressed in black for a special commemorative ceremony,
with a podium set up outside the National Museum and an enormous
banner showing Stalin’s face. Since Gottwald was in Moscow to attend Stalin’s
funeral, the main speeches were given by Zápotocký (in Czech) followed by
Široký (in Slovak). According to the ‘revolutionary’ style in vogue at the time,
the speeches were declaimed rather than spoken, and were virtually indistinguishable
from one another. The first half of each Communist leader’s
speech expressed gratitude to the ‘Great Stalin’ as the ‘Defender of Peace’,
‘Champion of Working People Everywhere’ and Czechoslovakia’s ‘Teacher,
Liberator and Friend’; the second half, less traditionally for a funeral oration,
furiously lambasted ‘capitalists’, ‘criminals’, ‘Fascists’, ‘traitors’ and other
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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204 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
vaguely defined enemies. Široký, a short and slightly absurd figure, became so
hysterical during the latter part of his speech that his voice cracked; but no
one laughed. The speeches concluded, in a manner highly reminiscent of
Nazi rallies, with the crowd asked to take a public oath to ‘defend socialism’.
The ceremony was then rounded off with a gun salute and the singing of
‘The Internationale’.91
Within a fortnight, the entire performance had to be repeated, this time
to mark the death of President Gottwald, who died on 14 March 1953, officially
of a cold caught while attending Stalin’s funeral, but presumably in
fact because of his rampant alcoholism. Gottwald’s body, like Stalin’s, was
embalmed and placed on public view in a glass coffin. Wrapped in the
Czechoslovak flag and flanked by soldiers, the corpse of ‘K.G.’, the first
‘Worker-President’, was solemnly carried on a gun barrel from the Castle,
past Letná plain, across the River Vltava to Republic Square, up to the
National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square, and then to its final resting
place in a special tomb, reminiscent of Lenin’s tomb in Moscow, at Vítkov.
Despite frantic KSČ directives to keep numbers down, a crowd of 200,000
filled Wenceslas Square to capacity to hear his funeral oration. This time, they
were treated to an even fiercer speech by Zápotocký, which climaxed with
a public oath in which everyone present swore to continue to ‘build socialism’
and never to turn their backs on ‘the Soviet Union’, ‘Lenin’, ‘Stalin’ and
‘progress’. On May Day 1953, which was marked by the launch of
Czechoslovak television’s first regular broadcast, the same message of ‘no
change’ was again strongly signalled. The leadership had little choice but to
continue on the same path. Not only was it in the middle of preparations for
yet more political trials, to thoroughly purge the KSS, but the Czechoslovak
economy – which had faithfully followed the Stalinist model of promoting
grand symbols of heavy industry at the expense of consumer needs – was
approaching collapse. A drastic devaluation of the Czechoslovak crown by a
factor of ten, which was later remembered as the ‘Great Swindle’, was already
scheduled for 1 June 1953.92 As things turned out, the monetary reform was
to lead to demonstrations and even riots so widespread and severe that they
could only be put down by making the fullest, most brutal use of police
powers, giving those who took part in the demonstrations another reason to
resent and hate the regime under which they lived.
In Moscow, where Nikita Khrushchev took over as first secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there were immediately signs that some
sort of power struggle was taking place in the Kremlin. Luckily for Antonín
Zápotocký, who as prime minister had betrayed Slánský to the StB, too many
people were implicated in the recent party purges for his own neck to be at risk,
and he was unanimously elected Czechoslovakia’s second ‘Worker-President’
by the National Assembly on 21 May 1953. Antonín Novotný, who had been
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 205
specially commended for his help in ‘unmasking’ Slánský and other ‘traitors’,
took over as general secretary of the KSČ, while Viliam Široký, the rising Slovak
Communist star who was hard at work rooting out ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalism’
in the KSS, was made deputy prime minister. Zápotocký made his first
presidential appearance on the same balcony at the Castle where Hitler had
received crowds of Sudeten Germans in March 1939. This time, a Czech crowd
chanted ‘Long live Comrade President!’93
No sooner had Stalin died than Pravda, the Soviet equivalent of the KSČ’s
Rudé právo, suddenly stopped printing stories about a supposed plot hatched
by Jewish doctors to take Comrade Stalin’s life. Within six months, Beria, the
chief of the Soviet secret police, had himself been accused, put on trial,
sentenced and executed. As Zdeněk Mlynář, a promising young Czech
Stalinist who had been sent to study at the Higher Political School in Moscow,
later recalled, throughout 1954 and 1955 criticism of Stalinist terror was
voiced more and more openly, while even party-controlled newspapers began
to criticize aspects of Soviet bureaucracy and to write about the need for
‘collective leadership’ in the party, campaigns against ‘cosmopolitanism’ gradually
died out and the atmosphere of suspicion relaxed. As a young Slovak
Communist named Alexander Dubček who was brought up in the Soviet
Union later recalled, the most extraordinary symbol of the changing times
came at the end of 1955, when Khrushchev flew to Belgrade and addressed
Tito – who until recently had been called an ‘agent of imperialism’, ‘executioner’
and ‘imperialist lackey’, and caricatured as a vulture-faced figure in
Nazi uniform with a blood-soaked axe in his hand – as ‘Dear Comrade’.94
Oblivious to the signs of change that those living in Moscow were beginning
to notice, on May Day 1955 (ten years after the idea had first been
mooted, six years after the foundation stone had been laid and two years after
Stalin and Gottwald’s deaths), a colossal statue of Comrade Stalin leading a
vanguard of peasants and workers was solemnly unveiled on Letná plain, on
the very spot that T.G. Masaryk had once selected as the national Sokol exercise
ground.95 The monument, the subject of ‘voluntary’ drives and ‘enthusiastic’
national campaigns, measured a full 30 m (32.8 yards) in height and
weighed 14,000 metric tonnes (13,779 tons).96 In the same year, a specifically
Czechoslovak symbol of national and socialist unity was also launched: enormous
sporting pageants, reminiscent of the Sokol slets of years gone by, in
which masses of amateur gymnasts demonstrated their ability to move
in perfect synchronization: the Spartakiáda. The Spartakiáda, which was
designed – like economic plans – to recur every five years, and which
continued right up to the year 1990, drew on the patriotic associations of
gymnastics that Sokol had spread, but also sent out the subliminal message
that each individual had a place in the great socialist collective, in which the
whole was greater than the sum of its parts.97
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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206 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ on Stalin’s crimes as delivered to the Twentieth
Communist Party Congress at the beginning of 1956 dropped a bombshell to
hardline Communists the world over, not least in Czechoslovakia. Mlynář,
stunned, was particularly struck by the ‘concrete details’ of the ‘torture and
forced confessions in political trials’, which, as he could see only too well, had
‘direct implications for Czechoslovakia.’ Dubček, who did not feel ‘ready’ to
hear ‘much of what they were saying’, later recalled being ‘shocked when
they stated bluntly that Stalin had been a murderer’. The revelations were simply
‘too sudden’ and ‘too momentous’ to grasp.98 In the People’s Republic of
Czechoslovakia, where everything possible had been done to elevate Gottwald
to the status of a second Stalin, the currency reform of 1953 had led to widespread
economic misery, and the political show trials had rivalled those of the
Soviet Union in their scope, cynicism and brutality, the about-turn in Soviet
policy came as a particularly nasty shock to the KSČ leadership. Since those
members of the Communist Party who had survived the purges justified their
part in creating terror on the grounds of faithfully following Soviet orders, they
now found themselves in a dilemma. To admit their own guilt in creating and
perpetuating what were suddenly being called Stalinist ‘deformities’ might end
up costing them their necks; yet to continue to defend the status quo would
make them vulnerable to the charge of ‘deviating from the Soviet model’, the
very crime for which they had persecuted their former colleagues.
Unsurprisingly, the party leadership tried to walk a tightrope between these two
equally unpalatable alternatives, making a few noises of token approval of
Comrade Khrushchev’s new departure while at the same time doing everything
possible to prevent any real reform from taking place within the KSČ or the
KSS.99 The first cautious criticisms of the Stalinist model were therefore raised,
not by the top leadership, but in the lower ranks of the party and in university
departments of Marxism-Leninism, and were then aired at the Second Writers’
Congress held on 22–29 April 1956.
It was at a meeting of students from Charles University held on 26 April in
the School of Chemistry in the Albertov district of Prague that pressure on the
party leadership grew more trenchant in tone. Students suggested an end ‘to
mere copying of the USSR’ on the grounds that ‘mechanically adopting the
Soviet experience’ had ‘done great harm to our educational system and, in
particular, to our economic system’.100 Since, as some claimed, ‘further harm’
had been done ‘by playing the Soviet national anthem at the end of every
broadcast day [sic] and the displaying of Soviet flags at all occasions’, they also
requested that ‘the Soviet national anthem and Soviet flag be present only on
occasions which directly involve the Soviet Union, e.g. the November 7 and
May 9 celebrations’. The meeting turned into a heated debate, lasting five
hours, which ended in the adoption of a formal resolution asking for ‘a public
review of the Slánský and other political trials’ together with ‘a guarantee of
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 207
rightful political punishment for persons who tolerated illegal procedures
during interrogations and for those who directly carried out these procedures’.
It also requested an ‘amnesty for convicted persons similar to the amnesty
recently declared in the Polish People’s Republic’, and stated that it did ‘not
consider correct the view of Mr. Novotný’ that ‘The Central Committee . . .
decides and must decide the most important questions of the Party and state’
since this ignored ‘the principle that workers must be governed according to
their own convictions’ and ‘distorts the real content and leading role of the
Party’.101 Mladá fronta, the official newspaper of the Communist-controlled
Czechoslovak Union of Youth, which might have ignored or condemned the
students, instead suggested that, like ‘all honest people today’, the students
cared ‘only about eliminating the insufficiencies and mistakes in our life as soon
as possible’.102 After a deputation of students in Prague solemnly called on the
minister of education on 4 May with a resolution demanding change, copy-cat
student resolutions began to appear all over the country: first at Comenius
University in Bratislava and, by 15 May, at universities and colleges all over the
country, including at Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň, Košice, Banská Bystrica and
Nitra.103 The student protest movement peaked on 20 May, when it made use
of the traditional student carnival known as Majáles, reinstated for the first time
since 1948, to demand reform.
Luckily for the KSČ leadership, any desire for reform by high Communist
officials was for the time being dampened by the sight of the fraternal
Communist Party in Poland having to be rescued by the Soviet Union in
October 1956, and above all of the fraternal Communist Party in Hungary,
where civil war had broken out and secret policemen (ÁVH) were lynched
before the Soviet army came in to ‘normalize’ the situation and restore its
preferred Communist leadership to power. This was just as well, since the
Barák Commission, when it completed its investigations into the Czechoslovak
political trials, found that too many men in the current Presidium – not least
First Secretary Novotný – were so hopelessly implicated that it had little option
but to conclude that the trials had been conducted in strict accordance with
the law and to uphold all the guilty verdicts. In such a politically dangerous situation,
Novotný, on Zápotocký’s death on 13 November 1957, simply took over
the presidency of the republic in addition to retaining his position as first secretary
of the KSČ, blocking the way to any would-be rivals for power.
By 1960, the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia was proud of what it had
achieved. In less than fifteen years, the nationalization of industry and collectivization
of agriculture had been realized; the Church effectively silenced; the
army purged; rival political parties rendered powerless; and the economy reoriented
from wartime dependence on Germany to postwar dependence on
the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern bloc. A vast network of prisons
and forced-labour camps had been built or adapted to contain opposition and
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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PEOPLEPEOPLE’’SS
REPUBLICOFREPUBLICOF
HUNGARYHUNGARY
GERMANGERMAN
DEMOCRATICDEMOCRATIC
REPUBLICREPUBLIC
FEDERALFEDERAL
REPUBLICREPUBLIC
OFOF
GERMANYGERMANY
Prague
Olomouc
Ostrava
Komárno
Pardubice
Hradec
Králové
Ceské
Budejovice
Banská
Bystrica
Karlovy
Vary
Ústínad
Labem
Dresden
Brno
Gottwaldov
ViennaBratislava
Budapest
Debrecen
Salzburg
Linz
Passau
Kosice
Ciernánad
Tisau
Mukac
Sat
Presov
Uzhhorod
Kraków
Breslau
Neisse
Plzen
HUNGARY
AUSTRIA
PEOPLE’S
REPUBLICOF
POLAND
PEOPLE’S
REPUBLICOF
HUNGARY
ROMANIA
USSR
GERMAN
DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC
FEDERAL
REPUBLIC
OF
GERMANY
RO
WESTERN
SLOVAKIA
EASTERN
SLOVAKIA
CENTRAL
SLOVAKIA
WESTERN
BOHEMIA
EASTERN
BOHEMIA
SOUTHERN
BOHEMIA
CENTRAL
BOHEMIA
NORTHERN
BOHEMIA
SOUTHERN
MORAVIA
NORTHERN
MORAVIA
Vltava
Morava
Váh
Tisza
Elbe
D
anube
Oder
Vistula
Danube
0
0
50miles
100kms
TheCzechoslovakSocialistRepublic,1960–68
Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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BUILDING THE SOCIALIST STATE 209
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to silence dissent. Many of the inspiring and revolutionary aims for which the
older generation of Communists had been prepared to serve prison sentences
in the First Czechoslovak Republic, or to risk their lives under Fascism, had
been achieved, at however high a price. As Communists saw things, there were
no longer private capitalists or the old divisions based on social class; officially
at least, there was no unemployment and no homelessness. Free medical care,
old-age pensions and education were available to everyone. The average standard
of living, though by no means ‘affluent’, was ‘decent’ and believed to be
rising. Even the housing crisis, clearly ‘the most sensitive spot’ in the matter
of living standards, seemed to be ‘soluble in time by stepping up housing
construction, which the Stalinist emphasis on developing heavy industry had
eclipsed’.104 The KSČ and KSS had, in short, ‘achieved’ the primary aims of
‘socialism’ and so felt able to declare the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia
a fully fledged Socialist Republic.
On 9 April 1960, the regime took the precaution of readjusting the regional
boundaries of the state in such a way as to prevent any resurgence of Slovak
‘bourgeois’ nationalism and ensure a firm centralization of the state. This came
in the shape of a new law that divided the country into ten regions: seven in
the Bohemian Crown Lands and three in Slovakia (the western, central and
eastern Slovak regions). On 5–7 July, a state-wide congress of the Communist
Party of Czechoslovakia announced that socialism had been victorious in
Czechoslovakia, and discussed a draft of a new constitution to acknowledge
the fact. Article 1 of the constitution adopted on 11 July 1960 declared the
‘unitary state of two fraternal nations possessing equal rights, the Czechs and
the Slovaks’, to be a ‘socialist state founded on the firm alliance of the workers,
peasants and intelligentsia, with the working class at its head’, and to be ‘part
of the world socialist system’.105 Although the Slovak National Council was
preserved, it was specifically restricted to working ‘under the direction of the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’ to ensure ‘a uniform execution of state
power and administration’ together with ‘the general development of the
economy and culture in Slovakia’.106 The body that was supposed to administer
state policies in Slovakia, the Board of Commissioners, was abolished, as were
several Slovak branches of central institutions.
Article 4 of the constitution made explicit that ‘the guiding force in society
and in the state is the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia’, which was defined as ‘a voluntary militant alliance of
the most active and most politically conscious citizens from the ranks of the
workers, peasants and intelligentsia’.107 The ‘entire national economy’ was to
be ‘directed by the state plan for the development of the national economy’,
a plan that was ‘usually to be worked out for a period of five years’ and,
together with the annual state budget, promulgated by law.108 The place of
ideology was assured in Article 16, which stated that the ‘entire cultural policy
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210 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
of Czechoslovakia, the development of all forms of education, schooling
and instruction’ were to be ‘directed in the spirit of the scientific world
outlook, Marxism-Leninism, and closely linked to the work of the people’.
The state and the ‘people’s organisations’ were further instructed ‘systematically
[to] endeavour to free the minds of the people from the surviving influences
of a society based on exploitation’.109 As part of the constitution’s
stated aim of securing ‘the full development of socialist society’ and creating
‘the conditions for the gradual transition to communism’, particular attention
was to be paid to ‘eliminating the substantial differences between physical
and mental labour and between town and country’.110 In the latter aim, the
‘fraternal co-operation between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other countries of the world socialist
system’ was singled out for attention, and promises were made to ‘systematically
develop and strengthen this co-operation, which is based on mutual
assistance and the international socialist division of labour’.111
With the power of the Communist Party secure at home, and protected
internationally by the support of the Warsaw Pact and de facto Western acceptance
of the Soviet sphere of influence, the Czechoslovak government and
KSČ could afford to relax a little. Since a combination of fear, the desire to
do right by one’s family and the less lovely human characteristics of greed,
envy and ambition appeared to be enough to keep most people in check most
of the time, outright terror was no longer necessary. The subtext of the 1960
constitution was clear: although the most embarrassingly kitsch aspects of
the personality cult would no longer be insisted upon, and although mass
political show trials were no longer considered necessary to teach the population
at large the value of at least outward conformity, the party would
continue to monitor and control all aspects of citizens’ lives, its ideology
would remain firmly Stalinist, and its partnership with the Soviet Union
would continue, in the words of a favourite motto of the day, forever.
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=4585750.
Created from gla on 2020-11-06 07:22:31.
Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.