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This book is the result of an attempt to combine a number of my interests —Catholicism, Communism, East Central Europe, political parties, and the fateful times immediately after the Second World War. It is the most thorough study to date in the English language on Slovakia during the three crucial years from the end of the Second World War to the Communist takeover . Moreover, it treats a historically neglected but profoundly significant dimension of the period—the role of religion, in this case Catholicism, in public life. The period from spring 1945 to February 1948 was a particularly critical one in the history of Czechoslovakia and of Slovakia. Spring 1945 brought liberation. The war ended, and along with it the period of Nazi Germany’s influence and occupation. Deportation of Jews to death camps came to a halt. The Czechoslovak Republic was reestablished, with relations between Slovaks and Czechs put on a new footing. It was a time of reconstruction, and of retribution. Courts prosecuted wartime leaders and lesser collaborators. Most Germans and many Hungarians were expelled from the country. It was a time when the resurrected Czechoslovak Republic tried to find its place in a Europe growing increasingly polarized between the Soviet Union and the West. And it was a time when the Communist Party was on the ascendancy, culminating in its seizure of power during a political crisis in late February 1948. Most studies of this period deal with events in a Czechoslovak-wide context and examine the period mainly as background to the Communist takeover or as a part of the growing cold war between West and East.1 With few exceptions, Prague takes center stage. Another issue that is central in studies of this period, as indeed in many studies of Czechoslovakia, is Czech-Slovak relations.2 While I appreciate the importance of the Communist takeover, Czech-Slovak relations, developments in Prague, and larger issues of EastP r e f a c e ix West relations, I have chosen to approach this period in a somewhat different manner. Rather than proceeding from the vantage point of Prague, dealing with Slovakia chiefly as developments there impinge on the Czechoslovak Republic as a whole, the center of gravity of this work is clearly in Slovakia. Though I do not ignore Prague or relations between Czechs and Slovaks, I view developments in Slovakia first and foremost as products of Slovakia’s political landscape, and only secondarily as part of the broader Czechoslovak context. I also want to avoid a primary focus on Slovak grievances against Czech rule. This is in accord with my belief that an overemphasis on the Czech versus Slovak dimension of Slovakia’s history, important as that may be, gives a distorted view of developments there. I offer my study of the 1945 to 1948 period in part as a corrective to these approaches. Though it ends with the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the narrative focuses above all on the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, and the Democratic Party as they interacted in Slovakia, in accordance with issues of importance to Slovakia’s inhabitants. Though my research contributes to our understanding of the Communist takeover, it is more than that and should not be read simply as background to the February 1948 coup. Even more important, I want to address in my work the relative neglect of the religious dimension of East Central European history. Questions of religion have long been marginalized, if addressed at all, in works on the region in the twentieth century.3 But in fact, religious questions and conflicts have lain at or close to the heart of a number of key developments in the region’s history. Interwar Czechoslovakia, for example, was plagued by troubled relations between Czechs and Slovaks, the latter disaffected in part on religious grounds and rallying in large numbers around a Catholic party led by a Catholic priest, Andrej Hlinka. Whether it was the papal nuncio leaving Prague in 1925 in protest against a state holiday honoring Jan Hus, Archbishop Adam Sapieha of Kraków objecting to government attempts to have Poland’s great leader Piłsudski buried in Wawel Cathedral, or the crisis in interwar Yugoslavia over a concordat with the Vatican in 1937, across the region one finds a religious dimension to social, cultural, and political conflicts . As Communism swept across the region after the Second World War, religious questions became even more acute, and the communist parties and the churches engaged...

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