This made for the other unique (or, given Chile much later on, almost unique) feature in the case of Czechoslovakia: the Communists were by a long head the strongest party. As part of his deal with Stalin, Beneš had already allowed them a great deal of weight in the National Front, where they took a leading role in Security, the Interior, and (though their man was theoretically non-Party) Defence. They used their weight quite cleverly to make sure of the police and the security services, the StB; they wormed their way into the trade unions; they set up ‘organizations’ for resistance fighters and the like which (as in France) they could parade as democratic and anti-Fascist bodies. In particular, they set up militias based on factories which, if there ever were a clash, could easily dominate the streets, given that neither police nor army would intervene. A free election in May 1946 revealed their strength. In the Czech lands they took 40.17 per cent of the votes, three other Czech parties taking 15-24 per cent each; of these, the Social Democrats contained an element that could easily take the Communists’ part and therefore even give them a slight Czech majority. In Slovakia the proportions were very different. There, a Slovak Democratic Party gained three fifths of the vote, the Communists under a third, which gave them, all in all, 38 per cent of the seats — still the largest party by far, but potentially a minority just the same.
In 1946, as tensions rose in Germany, Czechoslovakia still appeared to be an island of peace and even prosperity. Exports went ahead; Western visitors came and went; Czechs put themselves in the world’s newspapers with this or that far-flung expedition. There were political wrangles as the parties fought over one proposal or another, and the non-Communists managed to win one such, a proposal for a wealth tax that would have damaged small enterprise. But Czechoslovakia, her borders reaching far into the bloc, and even, for a few miles, contiguous with the Soviet Union’s, was no Finland, and there came a moment of truth in the early summer of 1947. George C. Marshall proposed his Plan, and the British joined him in inviting all European governments to attend a conference at Paris. The invitations went to the Soviet bloc, and the Russians did indeed appear in great numbers. The Czechs, and even the chief Polish economist, were anxious to go along with Marshall. But Stalin denounced the Plan, as a plot by which imperialists could take over weak economies such as those of central Europe and the Balkans; the bloc states, including Finland, refused to accept Marshall’s terms, and a Czechoslovak delegation in Moscow was also instructed along these lines. Czechoslovakia therefore missed out on the developments that were to turn neighbouring West Germany, in a short space of time, back into a great trading industrial power.
As that development went ahead, Stalin could see that a rearmed West Germany, part of an imperialist bloc, would be on his doorstep, and an order went out for the Communist parties everywhere to respond. In August, at Szklarska Poręba in Silesia, a one-time German spa called Schreiberhau, in a manor house that had been turned into a secret-police sanatorium, a meeting of the main Communist parties was held, and was harangued by Andrey Zhdanov, the cultural commissar. There would be an end to ‘Popular Front’ tactics, i.e. alliances with treacherous middle-class or peasant politicians; trouble should be made, through strikes or whatever in western Europe, especially France and Italy; a union should be forced through of Social Democrats and Communists, and a one-party regime imposed, with all the paraphernalia of relentless propaganda and faked elections. This programme had already gone through in the Balkans and East Germany; Poland was nearly there; Hungary was about to undergo it, with the September elections. Czechoslovakia stood out but the secretary-general of the Czech Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, soon had a plan ready. There were two possible routes to takeover. Power might simply, Bolshevik-fashion, be seized. But that would be too obvious, and would shock western European opinion. Better ‘Trojan Horse’ tactics, infiltrating the enemy parties. That programme now went ahead.
It was helped by circumstances — the harsh winter, followed by a severe drought, made for discontent, and there was a fall in exports (even food was imported from the Soviet Union). There was also much grumbling among the intelligentsia, whose wages had fallen quite drastically whereas elsewhere, as the economy recovered, there were patches of prosperity. The Communists blamed the machinations of ‘capitalism’ and the effects of the Marshall meeting; they proposed to head these off with a tax on ‘millionaires’ but suffered an early and misleading defeat. The other parties, recognizing it to be futile, blocked it, and the block succeeded because the Communists had not yet established their own manipulable element among the Social Democrats. On 10 September came a mysterious development: the despatch of parcel bombs to three prominent non-Communist ministers, including the one responsible for Justice, Dr Prokop Drtina. But the essential manoeuvre came over Slovakia. There, the Communist-controlled Secret Service discovered an alleged conspiracy, of exiled ‘Fascists’ colluding with Democrats. There followed 450 arrests, and the trade unions went into action to demand a suppression of the Slovak governors. They were replaced by a commission, in which the ‘organizations’ were represented; and though there was of course opposition in Slovakia, it was in some degree divided by religion (Catholic and Lutheran) and in any case could not challenge the police and the trade unions, who muzzled the media. Later on, the archives of all of this became open, and were written up in somewhat surreal circumstances by Karel Kaplan, who revealed that there had been spies, known in code (agent V101 etc.), in the Catholic ranks. Slovakia had been corralled by November, and there was a great block of opinion in the Czech lands that now saw the Communists as guarantors of the unity of the country against the treacherous Slovaks. Especially, a decisive element among the Social Democrats drifted towards the Communist side, and was led by one of the wartime chieftains, Zdeněk Fierlinger, who had probably been a Communist agent all along. Meanwhile, in Prague, there were barrages of Communist propaganda, and displays of ‘the organized discontent of the masses’, and these hundreds of thousands of people, complete with threatening banderoles, were imposing enough. How were the non-Communists to respond?
In January 1948 a provocation was carefully set up. The parcel bomb incident was investigated by the police, at the behest of the Minister of Justice, Dr Drtina (in his memories, he is, Austrian-fashion, punctilious about recording the title ‘Dr’, even when applied to executed war criminals or Communist agents). They dragged their feet, and did so insultingly, as Czech officials knew very well how to do; the incident was used too as an excuse to plant ‘bodyguards’ on the non-Communist ministers, and the state security service by now contained men who had been given a Soviet training. Drtina’s investigation led towards two police officials, whose arrest by the Minister of the Interior (and police) he now demanded. The affair reached the cabinet, and its chairman, Klement Gottwald, refused to act. We know the sequel from both sides — memoirs on the one, secret archives on the other. Stalin advised confrontation, once he was assured by Gottwald that the Red Army would not have to intervene, and he flew into Prague his long-term Czech expert, the former ambassador Valerian Zorin. On their side, the non-Communist ministers talked to the American and British ambassadors, and conferred among themselves or with President Beneš. Beneš told them not to risk a battle, but they themselves wanted one, in the expectation that early elections would be called, which, given the Marshall Plan as support, they would win. In fact elections were due that May, but Drtina and his friends feared that the Communists, being in charge of the arrangements, would bring off the sort of coup that had worked in Poland, with the fraudulent referendum. So they forced a crisis, and resigned. If a majority of the ministers had resigned from the government and from the National Front especially, there would indeed, formally, have been a government crisis, compelling Beneš to act. On 18 February they threatened to resign, and on 20 February twelve of the twenty-six ministers did indeed do so.