Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

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leg. The Czechoslovaks were further embittered when General Patton's Third Army rumbled to the outskirts of Prague, only to stop and, following an agreement between the Allied commanders, stand off while the Russians were allowed to liberate the city.

In agreement with Moscow, the Czechoslovak government that had spent the war years in exile in London returned to Prague in 1945. Eduard Beneš became President and Jan Masaryk Thomas' son, Foreign Minister: the Communist Party leader Kiement Gottwald, who had been in exile in Russia was appointed Vice Premier and, a year later, Premier. In free elections held in 1946, the Communists won 38% of the vote, Beneš party only 26%; the rest was spread through a group ot splinter parties. A coalition government was formed, and in 1947 it decided to accept U.S. aid under the Marshall Plan Stalin furiously forced the government to back down, but his suspicion of the coalition had been confirmed; he decided to do away with it.

When twelve non-Communist ministers resigned in 1948 in protest against Communist infiltration of the police, the Communists saw their chance. They seized virtual control of the government took over all mass communications and held rigged elections with only one list of candidates. Foreign Minister Masaryk fell to his death from his third-floor apartment window; the Communists said that his death was suicide, but much of the world believed that i was murder. Gottwald soon initiated a strongly Stalinist policy. He carried out mass arrests of "bourgeois" politicians and intellectuals, suppressed the Catholic Church (arresting most of its bish ops closing its seminaries and disbanding all religious orders), nationalized industry, collectivized agriculture and made police terror the law of the land.

At the insistence of the Kremlin Gottwald viciously purged the party in 1951 and 1952, executing eleven top Communists for Titoism and jailing hundreds more. Prague's police chief at the time particularly praised the city's Communist Party boss, a fellow named Antonín Novotný, for his "outstanding role in unmasking the conspirators." When Gottwald died in 1953, Novotný cannily got himself put in temporary charge of the party secretariat while the party was debating a successor. No one was ever able to dislodge him, and a few years later he also grabbed the presidency for himself. Stalin, too, died in 1953, and it is one of the cruelest tricks that fate played on Czechoslovakia that a Stalinist rose to power in the very year of his death. In 1955, Novotný had a huge statue of Stalin-reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world—unveiled in Prague on the commanding heights overlooking the Vltava River.

Striking a Truce. Novotný followed a rigidly orthodox Stalinist line. In no country behind the Iron Curtain, with the possible exception of Albania, did Khrushchev's destalinization speech at the Soviet Party's 20th Congress in 1956 have so little impact. Novotny banned books, plays and films, disciplined authors and artists and succeeded in finally strangling, by dogmatic ideas and rigid central controls the once robust Czechoslovak economy. When Czechoslovakia's much abused economy plunged into its worst crisis since the war and Khrushchev pushed his anti-Stalinist campaign farther, even Novotny had to knuckle under,