The Czechoslovak Communist Party rode the tide of pro-Soviet feeling which swept the country after the war, to win nearly 40 per cent of the vote in free elections held in 1946. But in May 1948, following a series of political manoeuvres of dubious legality, the Communists staged a coup. A sham constitution was then introduced by the new President, Klement Gottwald. Benes resigned in protest and the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk (son of Tomas), was found dead in the courtyard of Prague’s Cernin Palace, almost certainly murdered. Using the familiar Stalinist blueprint, Gottwald and his successors now set about transforming Czechoslovakia into a totalitarian state and loyal satellite of the Soviet Union.
Industry was nationalised, agriculture collectivised and repression institutionalised as the Czechs were railroaded into Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. At least Prague was spared the worst excesses of the architectural ‘renaissance’ visited on most of the other socialist capitals, though there was one blot on the landscape: an 18,000-ton (18,288,000 kg), 150-foot (45 metre) high statue of Stalin, glowering over the city from a perch high above the Letna Gardens. It was dismantled in 1962. By the mid-1960s there were calls from within the Communist Party for an economic and political facelift. In January 1968, the hard-line President, Antonin Novotny, was replaced as Party Leader by the reformer, Alexander Dubaek, who introduced the slogan ‘Socialism with a human face’. During the heady months of the ‘Prague Spring’ the Czechs enjoyed a degree of freedom they had not experienced for more than 30 years. But the Soviets were horrified by moves like the abolition of censorship, the rehabilitation of former dissidents, the challenge to economic orthodoxy and the questioning of the leading role of the Party. Dubaek and his supporters successfully fought off the dark threats, dire warnings and backstair intrigues orchestrated by Moscow before finally succumbing to the bludgeon of military force. On 21 August 1968 the tanks rolled into Prague and the reforms, as fragile as the flowers proffered to the bemused drivers, were crushed.
The Velvet Revolution
For the next twenty years, Czechoslovakia was subjected to the ‘normalising’ policies of a new leader, Gustav Husak. One-third of all Communists were expelled from the Party, more than a quarter of a million officials lost their jobs, 50,000 Czechs went into exile and thousands of prominent intellectuals, like the writer Milan Kundera, were forced into menial jobs as window cleaners and lift attendants while their works were uniformly banned. Meanwhile, the majority of the population was cynically ‘bought off by a carefully managed consumer boom. It was all too much for some. On 16 January 1969 a 20-year-old philosophy student, Jan Palach, set fire to himself in Wenceslas Square. Six weeks later, his brave but tragic example was followed by Jan Zajic. Others, like the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, took a more considered course, and in 1977 the Charter Movement was founded to monitor the government’s activities and its compliance with the Helsinki Accords on human rights.
Seen in retrospect, Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival on the scene in the mid-1980s, armed with the twin policies of perestroika and glasnost, was bound to cause seismic tremors in the bowels of the old Stalinist empire. But no one could have predicted the tumultuous events of 1989 when all of Eastern Europe threw off its chains as if at a given signal. In Czechoslovakia the period has become known as The Velvet Revolution. It began on 17 November when 15,000 people assembled in Vysehrad to commemorate the anniversary of the Nazi occupation. The intention was to march to Wenceslas Square but the police blocked the way at Narodni, allowing red beret units to charge the peaceful demonstrators with batons. One student, Martin Smid, was killed and hundreds more injured.
Actors and theatre employees responded by calling a strike and overnight the auditoria became meeting halls, echoing to the sound of political debate. The outcome was the setting up of Civic Forum, which began life in the Drama Club theatre near Wenceslas Square. All Prague was now in ferment. The students joined the strike, candlelit processions wound their way around the centre of the city and public rallies became routine. One particularly moving moment was when the banned singer Marta Kubisova sang the National Anthem to an ecstatic audience. The reemergence of the old hero Alexander Dubaek was equally memorable. Meanwhile, government and Party figures were manoeuvred into dialogue. On 26 November, while foreign journalists crowded expectantly in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, the leaders of Civic Forum were negotiating with members of the Central Committee in Obecni Constitutional changes, including the promise of free elections, were wrung from the authorities and the resignations began. Premier Adamec was followed, on 9 December, by Husak himself. With the formation of a new government, a fresh page in Czech history was turned.