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Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia



After Czechoslovakia was carved up by the Nazis, most Czech party and govern­ment leaders fled either to London or Moscow. As a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, Communist party leaders remaining in Czechoslovakia at first cooperated with German occupation authorities, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, they went underground and helped lead the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Although the underground Communists displayed bravery and effective activity against the Nazis, their record was not altogether enviable, for they attempted as well to discredit liberal resistance groups—sometimes even by leaking information on their membership to the Gestapo. A number of Communist leaders also went to Moscow to receive train­ing and later returned to Czechoslovakia with orders to dispose of future non-Communist leaders.17

Nevertheless, formal diplomatic relations among the exile government of Eduard Benes in London, the Czech Communist leaders who resided in Mos­cow during the war, and the Soviet government remained cordial. In December 1943, Stalin signed a Treaty of Friendship, Mutual Aid, and Positive Cooperation with the Benes government. Klement Gottwald, one of the Czech Communist leaders in Moscow, also agreed with the exile government in London that, pend­ing establishment of a constitutional and freely elected government in Prague after the end of the war, all parties would work together to create "National Committees" to administer Czech territory as it was liberated from the Germans.

The National Committees were established in accordance with the agree-

16 U.S. Department of State, Chief Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 544, 546.

"Josef Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, 1938-1948 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 59.

254 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

ment. But since it was the Soviet Red Army that liberated Czechoslovakia, the committees contained mostly trained Communists, who came in to administer the territory after Russian troops had cleared it of Germans. These agents also flooded the zone of military operations with propaganda and agitation and marked non-Communist local leaders (some had collaborated with the Germans) for eventual liquidation. By early 1945, thanks to the Red Army, the Communists had created local strongholds from which they could begin operating as a legiti­mate political party and simultaneously infiltrate and gain control of social groups. Moreover, the party enjoyed unprecedented popularity, for it was identi­fied among many Czechs with the Soviet Union, which had liberated Czechoslova­kia from the Nazis—while the Allies had abandoned the Czechs in 1938—and with a record of bravery as an underground partisan movement during the Nazi occupation.

Thus, when exiled Czech leaders met in Moscow to decide the composi­tion of the provisional government, the Communists possessed a basis of both organization and national prestige for their claims to important cabinet positions. The several portfolios they received were the most important for infiltrating and gaining control over the state's instruments of communication and coercion. The Communists took over the ministries of Interior (which controlled the court system and police), Agriculture, Schools, and Propaganda. A Communist sympa­thizer was named Minister of Defense.18

Communist subversion of Czechoslovakia culminated in the seizure of power in February 1948. To prepare for the coup d'etat, party leaders and cadres operated on two levels. Using their organizational base in the National Commit­tees, local administration, and important government ministries, they systemati­cally infiltrated and gained control of major economic and social voluntary associ­ations. They simultaneously worked as a traditional political party in parliament, initiating and lending their weight to popular reform measures and conducting party propaganda that emphasized democracy, Czech nationalism, and social reform rather then revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the more clandestine level, the Communists first gained control over the media of mass communication, through which they could make their promises and sell a program to the people. Even before the war had ended, the Red Army donated captured German printing presses to Czech Communists, and as early as 1945, the Ministry of Information (with the probable assistance of Soviet propaganda experts) started publishing dailies, weeklies, and monthlies disguised as organs of trade unions and other voluntary associations. By 1947, only members of the Czech Journalists' Union (Communist-controlled) were permitted employment as editors of newspapers. Non-Communist editors were either suspended or forced to retire by the Communist-controlled typesetters' union. Communist and pro-Communist ministers were given access to the na-

18 Vratislav Busek and Nicolas Spulber, eds., Czechoslovakia (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 432.

255 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

tional radio network as often as they desired, whereas other party leaders were limited to perfunctory appearances. The media of mass communication and the bogus journals were constantly used to extol the Soviet Union and the Czech Communist party and to embarrass non-Communist leaders.19 Propaganda was also used to heighten social tension and to alter and control the behavior of non-Communists by changing their images of facts and values. In the Czech Communist propaganda, the Soviet Union became the symbol of anti-Fascism and liberation, the Communist party assumed the mantle of progressive democ­racy and social justice, while all other parties and business classes were pictured as Nazi collaborationists.

A number of techniques were used to gain control of administrative organs. For example, Communist ministers already in the government employed vast numbers of comrades, then recommended economy programs in which they released thousands of non-Communist civil servants. The army, too, was effectively neutralized. "Unreliable" officers were purged and their places filled by Communists or their sympathizers. The General Staff as well as the Directorate of Defense Intelligence passed into Communist hands, and political officers— patterned after the political commissars of the Red Army—systematically indoc­trinated Czech troops. The Minister of Interior organized a National Security Corps, an armed body of party adherents, and Provincial Security Departments (ZOB), both of which were staffed with reliable personnel.20 It was one of the functions of these intelligence networks to identify all potential and actual anti-Communist leaders and subject them to various forms of intimidation. Finally, the party infiltrated the most important agricultural, labor, women's and intellec­tual groups or copied the prewar pattern of Nazi subversion in Austria and formed various "front" organizations, whose close connections to the Commu­nist party were not revealed. By capturing leadership in the country's most important voluntary associations and by creating "front" organizations, the Com­munists added an even broader base from which to disseminate propaganda and agitate among the people. Their control or major role in these organizations also helped create additional prestige for the party and afforded them a large amount of favorable publicity.

As a parliamentary organization, the party was no less effective. In the 1946 elections, it won the largest proportion of votes (38 percent), and in alliance with other parties was able to introduce and pass social reform legislation that further increased its popularity throughout the country. Small landholders and tenant farmers, for example, delivered thousands of votes to the Communists after receiving land under agricultural reform legislation. The Communist party, even though it had no parliamentary majority, was able to dominate the legislative branch of the government for almost three years. It enjoyed this position by creating a three-layered parliamentary alliance, which it directed much as a hold-

19 Rudolf Sturm, "Propaganda," inCzechoslovakia, eds. Busek and Spulber, pp. 107-13.

20 AndrewC. Janos,The Seizure of Power: A Study of Force and PopularConsent, Research Monograph No. 16 (Princeton, N.J.: Center for International Studies, 1964), pp. 33-34.

256 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

ing company controls several nominally independent corporations. First, it en­tered into an alliance with the Social Democratic party—the "Marxist Bloc"— in which it made most policy decisions by virtue of its numerical superiority. This alliance was then amalgamated into a "Socialist bloc" of all Marxist and non-Marxist socialist parties. Finally, the Socialist bloc represented a majority in the "National Front," which governed the country without serious op­position.21

By the end of 1947, Communist popularity began to wane, as an increas­ing number of non-Communists were removed from important political and social positions and party leaders resorted increasingly to blackmail, terror, bru­tality, and intimidation against the opposition.22 The party feared that in the elections scheduled for March 1948, it would suffer a serious electoral defeat. Even so, the ground had been prepared carefully for the final seizure of power. The state's instruments of coercion were either neutralized or pro-Communist; most media of communication were firmly under the direction of the party; and some of society's most important voluntary organizations could be relied upon to support a coup d'etat. The crisis came in the winter of 1948. Communist cabinet ministers precipitated a serious government stalemate that forced several non-Communist ministers to resign. Klement Gottwald, the leader of the Com­munist party in the government, called upon workers to demonstrate, and the Ministry of Interior exhorted other public-spirited groups to send protests to President Benes. The National Security Corps was ready to lead an insurrection, and in some districts, workers were armed. In others, groups of workers took over factories and transportation facilities. Party and government agents con­ducted mass arrests of anti-Communists, while special "Action Committees" gained control of the main government administrative offices. Benes was forced to accept a Communist-dominated cabinet under Gottwald's leadership. It only remained for the Communist-dominated cabinet and ministries to consolidate their power throughout the land. Most political parties were banned, many non-Communist political leaders jailed, and the most important symbols and institu­tions associated with the democratic regime destroyed. Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, long a popular figure identified with his father's struggle for Czech independence from Austria, committed suicide—although many claim he was murdered by the Communists. With this tragedy, liberal democracy came formally to an end in Czechoslovakia.

We have defined subversion as a series of essentially clandestine actions undertaken by one state, enlisting some citizens abroad through propaganda, infiltration, and terror to overthrow the established regime in their own country. Wasn't the seizure of power in Czechoslovakia really a domestic Communist revolution? It will be years before the role of the Soviet party and government in the Czech subversion is fully revealed, but some facts are already established with reasonable confidence. First, although the operational details of subversion

21 Vlatislav Chalupa, The Rise and Development of a Totalitarian State (Leyden, Netherlands: H.E. Stenfert Kroese, 1959), p. 85.

22 Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, pp. 185-87.

257Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

were locally planned and executed, the main strategy—which had started as early as 1941—was formulated throughout the period in Moscow. Second, during the war, hundreds of Czech Communists were trained in the Soviet Union to prepare the ground for the seizure of power. Third, in 1944, the Red Army played a major role in establishing the National Committees, liquidating Czech anti-Communists, and donating money, arms, and printing presses exclusively to Communist agents—all in violation of the 1943 treaty, in which the Soviet government had sworn not to interfere in the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia. Fourth, every time the Benes government attempted to resist Communist de­mands after the war, the Red Army would begin "maneuvers" on the Czech frontiers to intimidate non-Communist political leaders. Much as in the events of 1938, the Czech government faced an organized rebellion at home as well as the threat of external intervention. Finally, it is probably no coincidence that the Soviet deputy foreign minister arrived and remained in Prague during the week of the seizure of power.23 His exact role in the coup d'etat has not been revealed through published documentary evidence, but most Western and former Czech authorities claim that he was not in Prague merely to offer a gift of Russian wheat to the Czechs, as the Communists claim. Soviet presence in Czechoslovakia and in the background was an important factor in the collapse of Czechoslovakia's postwar democratic government.

 




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