ABSTRACT
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was founded in 1921 and soon became the most important radical protest party within the country's liberal democratic system, regularly winning around 15 percent of the vote in general elections and taking dozens of seats in the national parliament. The party underwent – and has divided along – all the key debates of the interwar socialist movement, such as on Bolshevization, the Moscow Trials, the popular front against fascism, and so on. It was made illegal in 1938, but its wartime underground activity – along with the pro-communist reinterpretation of the whole resistance movement after 1945 – won the party a completely new reputation in the immediate post-war era. This is the moment where the political-history analysis of the chapter starts. It takes several key factors into account, including the interwar divisions of the communist movement, the specific post-war context, and the political geography of Czechoslovakia, namely all the divisions within the party and the public policy resulting from the contrast between the highly industrialized Czech lands with their deserted borderlands, previously inhabited by the expelled German population, and the much less modernized, but more ethnically conscious Slovakia. The main focus is on the Communist Party's rhetorical and practical strategy of gaining full control of the government in a step-by-step process including an agreement with the wartime government in London exile, the electoral victory in 1946, the infiltration and rebuilding of many governmental bodies ranging from the key ministries to regional administration. The analysis follows the institutional aspect of the “twist from party to government” in 1948–1989: which of the institutions of previous democratic framework – such as parliaments, other political parties, and so on – were preserved and how their image and control were ensured, which of them kept the original names, and what role this played in adjusting to and the functioning of the new establishment. But above all, the whole discussion is framed by the question of time and speed, the tempo in Party and governmental politics that should show interesting shifts and unnoticed continuities and ruptures in what has often been described as “forty years of static communist rule and general timelessness.”
