The Atlantic and Its Enemies (9 page)

There was a final decisive moment in February 1948, when Czechoslovakia fell under total Communist control, the ‘Czech coup’, as it was known. This was not at all easy, because the vital ingredients were missing: there was no Red Army occupation, and there was a functioning democratic state - and not only that, but one unlike the others in the Soviet bloc. The Czechs had serious heavy industry, and there were world-class firms such as Bat’a for shoes and Škoda for machinery; there was a substantial middle class, and, uniquely in the bloc, a large and organized working class. Czechoslovakia before the war had been roughly on the same level as Belgium, and even the capitals’ architecture had points in common, especially the ingenious twenties additions. In ordinary circumstances, the trade unions and the Social Democrats would no doubt have co-operated with some farmers’ party, whatever its name, to profit from the Marshall Plan and leave Czechoslovakia associated with the West - a sort of Austria or Finland. Such a solution to the Soviet problem was clearly in the mind of the Czech leader in exile, Edvard Beneš. He did not go down the Polish path, to challenge Moscow; instead, he went out of his way to reassure Stalin, and made no trouble when, at the end of the war, the Soviet Union annexed a strip of land on the Carpathians that had a Ukrainian population. He maintained good relations with the Czech Communists who had chosen exile in Moscow, and his ambassador there even turned out to be a Communist agent. A Czech force, again commanded by a man who turned out to be an agent, operated on the Eastern Front - all of this in absolute contrast to the behaviour of the Poles. The counterpoint was of course that the Red Army would not occupy Czechoslovakia, and in due course it did indeed depart. In May 1945 a five-party coalition took over the government, and a year later there was a free election. Prague, undamaged by war, struck a Polish journalist, Stefan Kisielewski, as a miracle: quite unlike grim Warsaw, its shops were full, the lights were working, the hotels were functioning, and even the old aristocracy could be seen making their way through the cobbled medieval streets in black tie, to this or that dinner party in some Schönborn or Lobkowitz Palace. ‘Our Communists are not like the others’ was a line that foreign diplomats or journalists often heard, and some of them were quite impressed by the fluent and knowledgeable minister of culture, Václav Kopecký, who could talk about film and much else. When the British historian A. J. P. Taylor visited Prague, his old London acquaintance, Beneš, showed him the undamaged Prague skyline with pride: ‘all my doing’. He had even sent a ‘plane-load of senior non-Communists to Moscow to negotiate terms with the Communists there, and Stalin, at a farewell banquet, had assured them, “We will never interfere in the internal affairs of our allies.” ’

But circumstances would prevent Czechoslovakia’s becoming Austria or Finland, let alone Belgium. In 1945 there was indeed a sort of Popular Front regime, as the Communists understood it - an alliance with the Social Democrats and with the ‘progressive’ elements of the middle class (for historical reasons, one element was called ‘National Socialist’, essentially anti-clerical and anti-German). But the two chief political parties had been knocked out because of their behaviour during the war. Hitler had taken over the rump of the Czech lands, as a ‘Protectorate’, and there had been a collaborationist government run by the old Agrarian Party, the chief Czech party before the war. Collaboration had gone so far that the Czech lands, along with Belgium, were the only parts of Nazi-occupied Europe in which industrial production had gone up, not down. Its chiefs were put on trial and the party was banned. Slovakia had been even more heavily involved in collaboration. She had been given independence, and a nationalist or even Fascist regime had followed in 1939, under a priest, Mgr Jozef Tiso. With the blessing of the Yalta conferees, only ‘anti-Fascist’ parties were now allowed into parliaments, such that the two largest elements in Czech and Slovak politics were banned. Slovakia might, as today, otherwise have remained independent, and it was really only Soviet support for the integrity of Czechoslovakia that kept the country together.

On the face of things, restored Czechoslovakia was a functioning democracy, complete with cabinet and parliament and debates. However, the real centre of power lay in the ‘National Front’, a body on which were represented, by appointment, the five permitted political parties, and the administration consisted of ‘national committees’, again not elected. Not only this: the party members in the supposed parliament were under orders to vote as they were told by the National Front. In its regional and local committees, there was not much opposition to the Communists and they had a vast prize to offer. With Stalin’s support, the 3 million German inhabitants of the country were expelled in 1945-6, with a suitcase each. In German-inhabited towns (in Slovakia, to a limited extent, the same happened with Hungarians), placards went up, couched in the same insulting language that had been used by the Nazis as regards the Jews: ‘All Germans, regardless of age or sex’, were to collect in the town square and be marched off or in some cases moved by train, and dumped in shattered Germany. Unknown numbers died, and their property was free for the taking. However, since the Communists controlled the relevant administration, anyone aspiring to take over these lands and houses, including many gypsies, would have to register with the Communist Party (as happened in Poland). The non-Communist elements in the National Front did not object to this - quite the contrary, they were even more vociferous about the process than the Communists themselves, and one of the chief ‘National Socialists’ (or ‘Radicals’, a more suitable translation), Peter Zenkl, argued for the abolition of ‘capitalism’, by which he meant foreign-owned plants and farms. A land reform took over 5m hectares, one fifth of them forest, and three fifths of industrial output was taken over by the State, again with the blessing of the non-Communists. Even the Communists argued for a slower speed of change and put themselves forward as protectors of ‘the small man’. Meanwhile, on any national issue, including irritating little territorial claims against Poland, the five parties were glued together. This mattered very greatly in anything to do with Slovakia. Where the Czech lands were prosperous and modern, Slovakia was in many ways backward: still heavily peasant and Catholic, the educated element often Hungarian and Jewish or, where Slovak, part of the small Lutheran minority. When Slovakia had declared independence in March 1939, it had been a vast blow to the Czechs, hitherto the dominant people, and there was still much resentment at the Slovaks’ behaviour during the war, when they had been pampered favourites of the Third Reich. Since it was Stalin and the Communists who in effect kept the country together, they received Czech support.

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.