Communist coup in Czechoslovakia (1948)

In February 1948, the coalition cabinet (formed in 1946, Prime Minister Clement Gottwald), which included members of all major parties of the republic, underwent an acute political crisis. His reason was the demand of representatives of the National Socialist Party to submit a report on the actions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, headed by a member of the presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Vaclav Nosek , since his actions were considered an attempt to carry out a politically motivated purge of personnel. ^[1] (on February 13, 1948, eight senior non-communist officers were dismissed from the Ministry of Internal Affairs). When the Ministry of Internal Affairs refused to comply with the Cabinet’s instructions, the ministers of the National Socialist, People’s and Democratic Parties resigned, suggesting that this would entail the dissolution of the government and new elections. However, the Social Democratic Party did not support this decision, and the two non-partisan ministers, too, and thus, since only 12 out of 26 cabinet members left their posts, the government, which was then headed by the communist Clement Gottwald , retained his powers, and the prime minister demanded President Benes has a mandate to replace the retired ministers with new ones ^[2] .

Taking advantage of the moment, the Communist Party went on the offensive, organizing mass meetings and strikes throughout the country in support of its point of view. The largest event was a rally on Old Town Square in Prague on February 21, when, despite the weather being unusually cold for the region (minus 25 degrees), more than 100,000 people gathered ^[3] . On February 24, a one-hour strike in support of the Communists took place, in which more than 2,500,000 people took part ^[4] . On February 25, armed parties of the Communist Party led by Josef Pavel , Josef Smrkovsky and Frantisek Kriegel were withdrawn to the streets of Prague, who had previously taken control of key objects of the capital. After heated discussions, the Social Democratic Party took the side of the Communists, and along the way the leadership changed in the National Socialist and People's Parties, where supporters of the alliance with the Communist Party triumphed ^[5] .

Under strong pressure and under the threat of a new general strike, Benesh was forced to accept the cabinet’s resignation and approve a new government, in which 11 communist posts held ^[6] . On February 27, the new government was sworn in.

Following this, persecution of the opposition began, about 250,000 members of the opposition parties lost their jobs and about 3,000 people were forced to emigrate ^[7] . The National Security Corps and the State Security Service have finally turned into an instrument of the HRC policy under the leadership of the Minister of the Interior, Vaclav Nosek and his deputy, Jindřich Vesely .

Contrary to popular belief that the Soviet army was involved in the events of February, there were no Soviet troops at all at that time in Czechoslovakia at that moment, and despite the requests of Gottwald, the USSR refused to even conduct maneuvers in the border zone ^[9] .

Until February 1948, Czechoslovakia remained the last Eastern European state to be liberated by the Red Army from Nazi invaders, where the full communist government was not in power. It is believed that this event had a serious impact on the post-war structure of Europe and its division into blocks of capitalist and socialist states .

In 1948, the UN Security Council held 9 meetings on the Czechoslovak issue ^[10] , where most Western states condemned the communist coup. The Permanent Representative of Great Britain to the UN, Cadogan, at a meeting on March 22, noted ^[11] :

One after another, the countries adjacent to the USSR fell under the brutal power of the communist minority ...

In other countries, we observed the same process when a well-organized minority seized power, purged all elements opposing it, abolished the democratic system of government , abolished all ordinary freedoms, and created a police state in a certain pattern. What happened last month in Czechoslovakia happened even earlier in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and Poland. In violation of the solemn international pledges made in Yalta that a free democratic government will be introduced everywhere, in all these countries all parties except the communist party were gradually or immediately liquidated.

As with the October Socialist Revolution in Russia , the events of February 1948 in Czechoslovakia have a wide range of assessments. An example of the range of their spread is as follows:

• The February events of 1948 were a communist coup in Czechoslovakia , carried out by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia .
• The February events of 1948 were one of the stages in the development of the national democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia ^[12] - a specific form of peaceful transition to socialism, using the constitutional mechanism of bourgeois democracy. In the specific political conditions of Czechoslovakia, these events constituted “an unsuccessful attempt ... of a bourgeois reaction (the leadership of the National Socialist, People’s and Slovak Democratic Parties) to carry out a counterrevolutionary coup, overthrow the people's democratic system and restore capitalism in the country” ^[13] .
• Under the conditions of a multi-party system, the CPC acted in February events not solely, but as part of a coalition with the Socialist Party and non-partisan ministers who did not support the initiative of the Czech National Socialists and the then populists and Slovak democrats to provoke a political crisis.
• The "bourgeois republic" was not overthrown. The president and prime minister remained in place; less than half of the government was replaced, and those who left it did so on their own.
• Until the adoption of the Constitution on July 11, 1960, Czechoslovakia was not a socialist republic by its Basic Law . The economy of the Czechoslovak Republic (as it continued to be called) remained multistructure, with the presence of private property.
• The concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat” does not apply to Czechoslovakia as a country of popular democracy . “The most important difference between a people's democratic revolution is the nature of the state power it establishes — the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the revolutionary classes led by the proletariat ” ^[14] .

• Prague Spring (1968)