ARTICLE RADOMÍR V. LUZA (New Orleans, U.S.A.) February 1948 and the Czechoslovak Road to Socialism In the period from 1944 to 1948 the hard uncompromising substance of Stalinism fell upon the countries of Eastern Europe. Following the iron- bound dictums of Stalin,they became tailored to the tone and ambitions of Moscow under the form of People's Democracies.* The emergence of com- munism as the ruling system from within the bounds of a single country pre- sented one of the most important events in the history of the international Communist movement. In the writings of Communist Czech and Soviet his- torians the era has developed an identity of its own as a distinct, interim phase in the transition from capitalism to communism.1 They see the coup d'etat of 1948 in Prague as crucially important because of the Czechoslovak strategic position, which "was of immense significance" for Moscow because the outcome of the conflict between the Communist and democratic forces in the Czechoslovak Republic could have either helped definitively establish Communist power in Eastern Europe or could have blocked at least temporar- ily the path to Soviet expansion not only in Czechoslovakia but in other countries as well.2 In fact, in the late 1940s both the East and the West *The nature of the subject, the recentness of the period, and the policy of the Czechoslovak and Soviet authorities in classifyingrecords have made it necessary for the author to draw mainly on primary source material included in the more scholarly and re- liable accounts of the Czech communist historians of the 1960s. I have compared the documentary evidence carefully in preparing this article, but I have not listed all works consulted. 1. Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Formovlnt" svttové socialisticke soustavy v letech 1944-1949, 2 vols. (Praha: Academia, 1975), pp. 7-9, 503-04. 2. Ibid. The main lines of the story of the February crisis as told by the communist and democratic historians are known, although many aspects of the activities of the communist leaders are still obscure. Only the opening of the Soviet and KSC archives would give a full insight into the respective roles of these two protagonists. For the surveys, see Josef Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, 1938-1945. Failure of Coexistence (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959); Hubert Ripka,, CzechoslovakiaEnslaved. The Story of the Communist Coup d'Etat (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950); H. Gordon Skilling, "The Prague Overturn in 1948," Canadian Slavonic Papers, 4 (1959), 88-104; Pavel Tigrid, "The Prague Coup in 1948: The Elegant Takeover," in Thomas T. Hammond, ed., The Anatomy of Communist Takeover (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 399-432; Paul E. Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1948 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963). A good biblio- graphy is given by Otfried Pustejovsky's "Der 'Februar' 1948 in der Tschechoslowakei. Probleme, Arbeitsbereiche, Literatur," Bohemia, 10 (1969), 324-404, and in ?esko- slovensklrevoluce 1945-1948 a llnor 1948 (Praha: Knihovna Ustavu dejin KS?, 1968). 45 attributed great importance to the fate of the republic. For the East, Czecho- slovakia was a show window to attract the Western countries, and for the West, the amount of independence that the country was allowed to exercise was an excellent indicator of Stalin's real intentions in all of Eastern Europe.3 Communist policies manage to mold themselves around specific historical phases.4 The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 changed abruptly the course of the Soviet-Nazi rapprochement initiated in the summer of 1939. As a result of a reexamination of Communist strategy, in 1941-43 Stalin re- turned to the old policy line of the popular front.5 In 1943 the Comintern was dissolved and Stalin endorsed the more flexible and diversified concept of national roads to socialism. He went so far in this direction that in the after- math of the war he felt. justified in expressing the view that under certain circumstances it was possible to achieve socialism without recourse to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the summer of 1946 in his conversations with the chairman and undisputed leader of the Communist Party of Czecho- slovakia (KSC) Klement Gottwald, the Soviet ruler expressly set the stamp of his approval on the KSC course, which emphasized the democratic process.6 This line came to a sudden end in the summer'of 1947. The events of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the present debate on the policies of the Communist parties in Italy, France, and Spain focus interest on the way in which the indigenous Communist parties have in the past en- deavored to resist or ultimately to espouse the establishment of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. While the West European Communist parties insist on re- taining their independence, the KSC views-apparently not without some On the communist side the most recent work is MiroslavBoucek and MiloslavKlimef, Dramaticke dny Unora 1948 (Praha: Svoboda, 1973). The most up-to-date and best is written after 1969 Švec "Cesko- study the unpublished" manuscript by Jan (anon.), Klovensk' Unory J948." z 3. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakis(KSC) views the takeover as part of a worldwide process of transition from capitalism to communism, similar in nature and chronology to revolutions in other People's Democracies. MiroslavBoucek and Miloslav Klime§, "Unorove událústi roku 1948," ?eskoslovensky'casopis historicky [hereafter No. 1 (1973), p. 8. 4. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski correctly stressesthat the communists were never "forever committed" to their policies. '`To a Communist every situation is fluid.... Once a new situation arises ... the preceding phase must give way and a new phase, with its own imperatives of action, begins.". "J1teSoviet Bloc. Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 49. 5. See Jaroslav Opat, 0 itot,oeidemoh. racii.Prispevek k dejinam narodne demokra- tickl revoluce v Ceskoslovenskuv letech 1945-1948 (Praha: Academia, 1966), pp. 318ff. 6. Gottwald at the Central Committee (CC) plenum, 25 Sept. 1946,, in Miroslav Soukup, "Nektere problemy vdjemných vztahu mezi komunistick?mi stranami," Pfflp£l ky k dXjin4mKSz` [hereafter PD KSC]`4 (Feb. 1964), 13. Gottwald's observa- tions on his visit to Stalin were not reprinted in his Spisy (Praha: SNPL, 1957), XIII, 122. The concept of the special national way to socialism with emphasis on national specifics had been shared by other People's Democracies. .