Notes
n o tes Preface 1. Among the works that treat the 1945–48 period in Czechoslovakia are Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism , Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1948 (London: C. Hurst, 1987); Josef Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia , 1938–1948: The Failure of Coexistence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959); Korbel, Twentieth-Century Czechoslovakia: The Meaning of Its History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Vladimir V. Kusin, “Czechoslovakia,” in Communist Power in Europe 1944–1949, ed. Martin McCauley (London: MacMillan Press, 1977), 73–94; Igor Lukes, “The Czech Road to Communism,” in The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, ed. Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), 243–65; Radomír Luža, “Czechoslovakia between Democracy and Communism, 1945–1948,” in A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948, ed. Victor S. Mamatey and Radomír Luža (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 387–415; Martin R. Myant, Socialism and Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hubert Ripka, Czechoslovakia Enslaved: The Story of the Communist Coup d’état (London: Gollancz, 1950); Dana Adams Schmidt, Anatomy of a Satellite (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952); Pavel Tigrid, “The Prague Coup of 1948: The Elegant Takeover,” in The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers, ed. Thomas T. Hammond (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 399–432; and Paul E. Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia , 1918–1948 (New York: Praeger, 1963). 2. See Jan Rychlík, Češi a Slováci ve 20. století; Česko-slovenské vztahy 1945–1992 (Bratislava: Academic Elektronic Press, 1998) for the most thorough coverage of CzechSlovak relations during this period. 3. George Weigel made this point in a review of The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, the index of which lists nine entries for King Zog of Albania but only one for Pope John Paul II. 4. According to the 1930 census, 71.61 percent of Slovakia’s inhabitants identified themselves as Roman Catholics, and an additional 6.42 percent identified themselves as Greek (or Eastern Rite) Catholics. This means 78.03 percent of Slovakia’s popula205 206 tion identified itself as Catholic. By 1950, the percentages had changed little, and even increased. In that census, 76.20 percent of Slovaks identified themselves as Roman Catholics, and 6.55 percent as Greek Catholics, for an overall Catholic proportion of 82.75 percent. The remainder of Slovakia’s population was largely Protestant. Lutherans comprised 12.02 percent of the population according to the 1930 census, and 12.88 percent in 1950; for Calvinists, the proportions were 4.38 percent and 3.25 percent respectively. Thus, in the 1950 census, 98.88 percent of Slovakia’s inhabitants identified themselves as Catholic or Protestant Christians. This data, to be sure, includes not only practicing believers but also those who belong to a particular confession only nominally; Jan Pešek and Michal Barnovský, Štátna moc a cirkvi na Slovensku, 1948–1953 (Bratislava: Veda, 1997), 13. 5. Hlinková Slovenská L’udová Strana. 6. The term “church” in the context of this study will refer to the Roman Catholic Church, though I realize that in other contexts it can mean all of Christianity, or any or all of its Eastern or Protestant churches. 7. In the First Czechoslovak Republic’s most recent parliamentary elections, of 1925, 1929, and 1935, the HSL’S drew 34.3 percent, 28.27 percent, and 30.1 percent of Slovakia’s vote; the Communist Party of Slovakia never drew more than 14 percent in any of these three elections. Moreover, while the HSL’S received nearly all its support from ethnic Slovaks, the Communists received considerable support from non-Slovaks, above all the Hungarian minority; for the data, and a discussion of these elections, see James Ramon Felak, “At the Price of the Republic”: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). 8. The successor states of the Habsburg Empire presented a broad spectrum of situations in the immediate postwar years. On the one extreme was Yugoslavia, where, owing to the success of Jozef Broz Tito’s Partisans, the Communists were firmly in control by war’s end. In Poland and Romania, Communists, aided by the occupying Soviet Red Army, pushed hard and early for...
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