Czechoslovak Coup of 1948: The Communist Takeover in Prague

The Czechoslovak coup of February 1948 was the seizure of full power in Czechoslovakia by the Communist Party, led by Prime Minister Klement Gottwald. Between 20 and 25 February 1948, after non-communist ministers resigned in protest, the communists used mass pressure, armed militias and control of the police to force President Edvard Beneš to accept a government under their control.

The takeover ended the last parliamentary democracy in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Together with the mysterious death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk two weeks later, it shocked Western opinion and hardened the Cold War division of Europe.

Background

Czechoslovakia had been a democracy between the wars until the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the German occupation that followed. Many Czechs and Slovaks felt betrayed by Britain and France, while the Soviet Union, whose Red Army liberated most of the country in 1945, enjoyed considerable prestige.

After the war, a coalition of parties called the National Front governed, under President Beneš. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) was the strongest member. In the free elections of May 1946 it won about 38 per cent of the vote nationally and around 40 per cent in the Czech lands, and Gottwald became prime minister. Communists held the key ministries of the interior, information and agriculture, and the interior ministry under Václav Nosek steadily filled the police and security services with party members.

Rising tension

In July 1947 the Czechoslovak government unanimously accepted an invitation to the Paris conference on the Marshall Plan. Stalin then summoned Gottwald and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to Moscow and made clear that participation would be seen as hostile to the Soviet Union, and the government withdrew. The episode showed the limits of Czechoslovak independence.

During the winter of 1947–1948 the political climate worsened. Polls suggested the communists might lose ground in the elections due in 1948, and in Slovakia the authorities moved against the Democratic Party. The crisis came to a head in February 1948, when Nosek replaced several senior non-communist police commanders in Prague with communists. A majority of the cabinet voted to reverse the decision, but he refused to comply.

The crisis of February 1948

On 20 February 1948, twelve ministers from the National Socialist, People’s and Slovak Democratic parties resigned. They expected Beneš to refuse the resignations or to call early elections, putting pressure on the communists. But the Social Democrats did not join them, and neither did the non-party ministers Masaryk and Ludvík Svoboda, the defence minister. The resigning ministers did not form a majority of the government, which allowed Gottwald to claim that he could simply replace them.

The Communist Party moved quickly. “Action committees” were formed in workplaces, ministries and organisations to purge opponents, and armed workers’ units, the People’s Militia, appeared on the streets of Prague. Gottwald addressed a large crowd in the Old Town Square on 21 February, and on 24 February a one-hour general strike involved some two and a half million workers. The police occupied the offices of non-communist parties, and the army, under Svoboda, stayed neutral.

The Soviet deputy foreign minister, Valerian Zorin, had arrived in Prague on 19 February, officially on another matter. His presence was widely seen as a signal of Soviet support. On 25 February a march by students towards Prague Castle in support of Beneš was stopped by police.

The same day, Beneš, ill and fearing civil war or Soviet intervention, accepted the resignations and appointed a new government proposed by Gottwald. It was dominated by communists and their allies within other parties. Gottwald announced the victory to a crowd in Wenceslas Square.

Key people

Klement Gottwald (1896–1953), leader of the Communist Party since 1929, spent the war in Moscow and returned as deputy prime minister in 1945. He became prime minister in 1946 and president in 1948, and ruled until his death in March 1953.

Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), co-founder of Czechoslovakia with Tomáš Masaryk, had been president before Munich and led the government-in-exile in London during the war. His decision not to resist in February 1948 has been criticised and defended ever since.

Jan Masaryk (1886–1948), a diplomat and wartime broadcaster from London, was foreign minister from 1940 until his death. He remained in office after the coup, a decision whose motives are still debated.

Václav Nosek (1892–1955), the communist interior minister, controlled the police and security forces that made the takeover possible.

The death of Jan Masaryk

Jan Masaryk, son of the country’s founder Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and a popular figure in the West, stayed on as foreign minister in the new government. On the morning of 10 March 1948 he was found dead in the courtyard of the Czernin Palace, the foreign ministry, beneath the bathroom window of his flat.

The communist authorities declared it suicide. Many at the time suspected murder, and the case has been reopened several times. An investigation in 1968, during the Prague Spring, was inconclusive, and in 2004 a Prague police inquiry concluded that he had been murdered, without identifying anyone responsible. Some historians still consider suicide or an accident possible. Because Prague’s history includes famous defenestrations, the death is sometimes called the “third defenestration of Prague”.

Consequences

A new constitution was adopted in May 1948, and elections on 30 May offered voters only a single list of National Front candidates. Beneš refused to sign the constitution and resigned on 7 June 1948; he died in September. Gottwald became president on 14 June 1948.

The new regime purged the civil service, universities and army, nationalised remaining private businesses and began the collectivisation of agriculture. Tens of thousands of people fled abroad, among them politicians, officers, writers and ordinary citizens who crossed the still lightly guarded borders into Bavaria and Austria before the frontier was sealed with fences and minefields in the following years. In the early 1950s show trials, culminating in the 1952 trial of party general secretary Rudolf Slánský and others, claimed victims even within the Communist Party itself.

Abroad, the coup had a powerful effect. Coming ten years after Munich, it convinced many Western politicians that Soviet expansion had to be stopped. It helped speed the passage of the Marshall Plan through the US Congress in March and April 1948 and the signing of the Brussels Treaty by Britain, France and the Benelux countries on 17 March 1948, a step towards the founding of NATO in 1949.

Timeline

• 1946, 26 May: The Communist Party wins about 38 per cent in parliamentary elections.
• 1947, July: Under Soviet pressure, Czechoslovakia withdraws from the Marshall Plan talks.
• 1948, 13 February: The cabinet majority orders the interior minister to reverse police appointments.
• 1948, 20 February: Twelve non-communist ministers resign.
• 1948, 24 February: A one-hour general strike is held in support of the communists.
• 1948, 25 February: Beneš accepts Gottwald’s new government.
• 1948, 10 March: Jan Masaryk is found dead at the Czernin Palace.
• 1948, 7 June: Beneš resigns; Gottwald becomes president a week later.

Why it matters

The February 1948 coup completed the communist takeover of Central and Eastern Europe and showed how a party could seize power through legal forms, street pressure and control of the police. It turned many in the West decisively against the Soviet Union and helped bring about the Western alliance that defined the Cold War.