In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

89 Unlike most of Eastern Europe between World Wars I and II, Czechoslovakia was by and large a political and economic success story. It had its problems, to be sure, but they seemed minor compared to those of its neighbors. As a new state born of World War I and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, it could look confidently toward the future. Under the leadership of two distinguished interwar presidents—Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), who became the first president of the new post–World War I Czechoslovak state in 1920, and Edvard Beneš (1884–1948)—its economy developed rapidly in the context of a burgeoning middle class. Interwar Czechoslovak society was also liberal enough to accommodate a broad range of political expression, including communism. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia—one of the largest in Eastern Europe before World War II—came into existence in May 1921 and remained active and competitive through the 1920s and 1930s. After Hitler’s conquest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, many of its members sought refuge in the Soviet Union or went underground. Following his return to Czechoslovakia from his London wartime exile in 1945, Beneš again became president of the country after being formally elected to his second term of office in June 1946. When the Communists assumed complete power in Czechoslovakia by the coup d’état of 25 February 1948, Beneš was compelled by circumstances to cede virtual authority to the Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald (1896–1953), his former prime minister in the previous coalition government. Yielding to the inevitable, he stepped down from the presidency on 7 June 1948, with Gottwald becoming president. Beneš died a little less than three months later. With strong backing from the Soviet Union, which had liberated Prague from the Germans, the Czechoslovak Communists felt sufficiently self-confident to lay the groundwork for a Stalinist regime that became one of the most repressive in all of Eastern Europe.1 Despite CzeCh o sl o Vak ia 90 | cZEcHosloVaKia the repression, advocates for human rights and democratic reform in Czechoslovakia helped usher in the relatively more liberal government of Communist Party secretary Alexander Dubček (1921–1992) and the so-called Prague Spring.2 The resultant euphoria was short-lived, however; the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to decisively put an end to the reform movement. In April 1969, Dubček was removed from office and replaced as party secretary by the Soviet stooge Gustáv Husák (1913–1991), who lost no time in re-Stalinizing the country. The Stalinism of the Czechoslovak regime was nowhere more in evidence than in the infamous Slánský trials of 1952.3 These were named after the principal defendant Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952), one of the pillars of the Czechoslovak Communist regime at the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s. An early member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Slánský rose through the ranks to become party general secretary after World War II and one of the architects of Communist rule in the country. His undoing in the early 1950s related to the Soviet-engineered expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948. This was triggered by Stalin’s anger at what he perceived to be Tito’s willingness to flout the Soviet leader’s authority by taking steps to prepare the groundwork for an eventually independent Yugoslav foreign policy and for more liberal measures in the economic and political spheres. The Yugoslav “road to socialism” was a nightmare to Stalin because of the threat it represented to the monolith of Soviet communism. In order to crush other incipient Yugoslavias throughout Eastern Europe, Stalin orchestrated a purge of “disloyal” elements within the national Communist parties. Rudolf Slánský, the staunch party loyalist who had spent the years of World War II in refuge in the Soviet Union, was one of the first prominent East European party figures to fall from grace. On 20 November 1952 he and thirteen other Communist leaders or officials were arrested and charged with participating in a Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy. All were convicted in a typical Stalinist show trial in Prague. Eleven were executed, Slánský among them; three were given life sentences. The Zionist dimension of the “conspiracy ” related to Stalin’s desire to rid the Communist parties in Eastern Europe not only of “disloyal” elements but also of high-placed Jews in leadership positions . Slánský himself was a Jew, as were...

Share