The Czechs in a Nutshell

It’s not hard to understand the broad masses’ collective amnesia. Sometime in the beginning of the 1990s, then-Premier (and now, President) Václav Klaus, a gifted populist who has an amazing ability to always formulate things exactly as Pepa Novák — the common Czech — likes to hear them, put it like this: “It’s impossible to drive forward with great speed if you constantly have to look in the mirror.” This is undoubtedly a very handy piece of advice. Especially, a somewhat cynical observer might add, if the things you see in the mirror are not tremendously pretty.

Let’s salt the wounds properly.

The Czechs themselves often say that the communists came to power through a coup ďétat, which implies that it happened against most people’s will. That’s not entirely true. In the elections in 1946, the communists got 38 percent of the votes, which was more than any other party. Consequently, common parliamentarian rules determined that their chairman, Klement Gottwald, became Prime Minister in the “National Front government”, a coalition of six parties.

True enough, in addition to being an alcoholic with syphilis, “Kléma” was an anti-democrat to the marrow of his bones who received his orders directly from Stalin. But the communists were able to take total control of the government in February 1948 simply because 12 of the non-communist government members resigned as a protest against the Minister of Interior’s scheming, believing that President Edvard Beneš would not accept their resignation.

Well, he did. Silently admitting that Czechoslovakia had become a part of Moscow’s sphere of power, Beneš concluded that the democratic forces didn’t have much of a chance in the long run. Maybe he was right, but the “February Coup” nevertheless smacks of a tactical blunder committed by the non-communist parties. As Gottwald himself later commented with vulgar precision: “They bent forward in front of us, so we simply had to kick them in the ass!” And it’s sad to say, but millions of Czechs were more than eager to help pave the way to disaster.

The Czechs’ enthusiasm for communism didn’t change much after the Bolsheviks came to power, either. When the brave democratic politician Milada Horáková was sentenced to death in a mock trial in 1950, people were signing petitions in support of her execution. True, the secret police’s repression was strong. Thousands of Czechs fled the country (see: Emigrants), thousands were thrown into jail and labour camps, and almost 180 people were executed.

Some private farmers did actually protest against the forced collectivisation, and there were even signs of open demonstrations when the communists, in 1953, in complete contradiction to what they had promised, carried out a currency reform that rendered most people’s savings worthless.

But for the most, the Czechs were content. So, when the Hungarians, in November 1956, were butchered in the streets of Budapest in their desperate uprising against Soviet-style communism, their neighbours in Czechoslovakia were busy buying presents and preparing for Christmas. The Czechs didn’t even hesitate to erect the world’s largest Stalin monument on the Letná Plain overlooking Prague. The atmosphere in totalitarian Czechoslovakia is well illustrated by the fact that the 30-metre-tall, 15,000 tons granite monster was only removed in 1962, nine years after the Soviet tyrant’s death...

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

But didn’t the Soviet invasion in 1968, which left dozens of civilians dead in the streets, crush far-reaching reforms? Wasn’t the Prague Spring basically an anti-communist uprising? Not really. Alexander Dubček and the other supporters of “Socialism with a human face” definitely wanted to reform Czechoslovakia after 20 years of Stalinism and increasing economic problems. Some of their measures, for instance to remove censorship, represented a giant step towards liberalization, and secured the reformers massive popular support.

However, not even Dubček questioned the Communist Party’s constitutional right to lead society. The Prague Spring reformers also worshipped Marxist-Leninist dogma, and they still believed in the command economy. Even worse, after the 1968 invasion, Alexander Dubček let himself be used as a puppet for the hard-liners by signing laws that were utterly un-democratic. That’s why most Czechs today regard the Prague Spring basically as a battle between two factions of the Communist Party. Or, if you like, as a failed attempt to introduce perestroika and glasnost some 17 years before Gorbachov did.