ABSTRACT
The Czechoslovakia that succumbed to communist rule in 1948 was not the Czechoslovakia of 1938. It was ethnically more homogeneous, with Czechs and Slovaks making up over 90 percent of the population. The visionary hopes of a Marxist "people's democracy" were never shared by the whole electorate and would be cruelly disappointed in any case by the eventual workings of Czechoslovak communism on the Soviet model, but all the same, the communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia was more than a coup. Blue-collar workers were treated very carefully in Czechoslovakia; one sign of this was the relatively small differential between working-class wages and those of professionally educated employees. Overall, within the bloc, Czechoslovakia's economic dependence on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the consistent subordination of its foreign policy interests to Soviet goals were second only to Bulgaria's. During the Soviet heyday of perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev's attempts to revitalize socialism were frequently compared with the Prague Spring.
