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From The New International, Vol. XV No. 2, February 1949, pp. 54–59.
Translated by Eugene Keller.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
One cannot fully understand the developments of the past period in Czechoslovakia without a knowledge of some of the background events prior to the coup of February 1948.
The Versailles Treaty – that most monstrous robber-treaty, as Lenin termed it in ignorance of our present times – threw together, into this country of hardly 15 million inhabitants, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians and Jews, without asking the individual minorities as to their national aspirations, even though the First World War was waged by the great powers under the slogan of the right of self-determination of all nations. The Czech economy inherited the larger part of its industry from the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy but had no outlet to the high seas or to the great Continental markets. It was France which played the biggest role in influencing its politics and economics, and it was France which forced the country into the system of the anti-Soviet cordon sanitaire.
These circumstances permitted Czechoslovakia, soon after the First World War, to achieve self-sufficiency in agriculture. Agricultural reform, which largely contributed to this, imposed limitations upon but did not liquidate the Austro-German and Hungarian nobility. But the state did come into possession of large areas of forest and land.
Soon, however, agricultural production increased to such an extent that prices threatened to fall far below those of the world market; a state grain monopoly was therefore created to maintain a balance between production, prices and acreage. These economic measures were politically possible because the bourgeoisie had vested political leadership in the hands of the Czech Agrarian Party, even though agriculture and industry were of equal social weight in the country. This could take place only because the large processing industries solidarized themselves with the landowners (breweries, paper, wood-processing industries, and distilleries).
Industry as a whole based itself mainly upon heavy industry and the armament industry, upon mining, glass, textile and porcelain manufacture, besides the already mentioned agrarian sector. Besides glass, it was the shoe industry and sugar refineries which played an important role as export industries.
The predominantly agrarian character and the rule of the Agrarian Party made necessary a coalition government of the parties representing the interests of industry. Foremost among these parties was the Social-Democracy, split up as it was into different nationalities. This party not only represented the needs of heavy industry but also rallied the most conservative and best-paid layers of the working class, and also based itself upon broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie. The party of Benes – the Czech People’s Socialists – was supported by small public employees, the small businessmen, and the rather reactionary nationalist elements of the free professions and the students.
To this all-national coalition of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat counterposed a single all-national party which was not differentiated by nationality, the Communist Party, which (in relation to the size of the population) was the strongest in the world, and which was the only CP generally, outside of the USSR, with a significant trade-union movement of its own. The CP was made up of German, Czech and Polish industrial workers together with Slovak and Hungarian farmhands and there were no internal national tensions.
The zigzag course of the Comintern, at the beginning of the world economic crisis which caused the Czech bourgeoisie to impose the major burden of the crisis upon the national minorities, changed this relationship so that the cadres of the working class turned toward the Social-Democracy. The Communist trade unions lost their influence almost completely by their policy of strikes-at-any-price and because the party became more and more the party of the unemployed. Hitler’s victory in Germany gave it the decisive blow: the German proletarians of Czechoslovakia were exhausted by years of misery and unemployment, and though not in their majority turning toward Hitler, they fell into hopeless passivity. They left the ranks of the CP, which instead was flooded with a tremendous number of petty bourgeois who, in fear of Hitler, wanted to crawl under the protective wings of Stalin.
This was approximately the situation existing at the time of the Munich agreement. The CP, through its spokesman Gottwald, together with the fascist general Gajda, supported the government of General Syrovy only because the latter was in favor of immediate war against Germany. But the masses were deeply disappointed, especially because of the non-intervention policy of Stalin with regard to the Munich agreement.
Immediately after Benes’ flight, and after the cession of the Sudeten areas, large parts of eastern Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine, the government banned the CP, but nobody shed any tears over it. Except for a few dozen paid secretaries and a few stalwarts, it had been virtually liquidated.
Hitler’s march into the country on March 15, 1939 merely completed what had already been an accomplished fact. The proletariat, petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie were still in the same condition of paralysis into which the Munich agreement had thrown them. The Stalin-Hitler pact contributed to this further, and the CP was unable to throw off its lethargy until shortly before the war’s end.
Hitler liquidated important parts of the bourgeoisie by compelling the Jews – who had played a leading role in industry and especially in banking – to flee, or by exterminating them physically. Similarly, those elements of the ruling class who attempted to revolt were liquidated, while the small and unimportant remnants of the bourgeoisie collaborated with the Nazis.
The working class, for the time being, profited from the intensified armament boom and had no objection to the liquidation of their hated masters; but this did not in the least mean that it was friendly to the Nazis. It looked upon the imposition of their rule as a mere changing-of-the-guards on top. The only elements who strove to fight Hitler were from the petty bourgeoisie, which was hardest hit by the Nazi dictatorship economically as well as in national feeling.
The sharpening of the internal difficulties, increasing shortages of food in the latter years of the war, and – last but not least – the great military successes of the Russian army brought about a stiffening of resistance. But again it was especially Benes who became the symbol of this resistance; the CP limited itself to backing him without qualification, and added to his slogans still more chauvinist slogans.
The first significant action of the CP made itself felt only when Russian troops entered the city exactly twenty-four hours after the Prague insurrection of May 5–9, that is, exactly a day after the last German troops had capitulated. Immediately posters appeared everywhere with the inscription: “They came in time,” with a picture of a Russian tank rolling through the Prague city gate. The major burden of the struggle was borne by the police and by former professional soldiers, with the proletariat participating only in small numbers and with the CP acting as an undifferentiated section of the insurrectionists.
In the May days of 1945 the power was in the streets. The bourgeoisie was practically non-existent, as we indicated above; but the proletariat, as a class force of its own, was without leadership. Benes triumphantly moved in with his government-in-exile.
Did power really lie in the streets? The Yalta agreement had provided for the inclusion of Czechoslovakia in Stalin’s sphere of influence. The West had handed over this area to Stalin. American and Russian troops could therefore be withdrawn without hesitation; the bureaucratic apparatus of Benes had the leadership of the country in firm hands. The expulsion of 3.5 million Germans took place with the consent and desire of all the great powers, at the same time representing the fulfillment of one of Benes’ dreams.
Stalin smiled slyly: the national homogeneity of the country – the Slovaks were easily held in check, on the one hand through the collaboration of their leadership, the backwardness of their country, the absence of significant layers of industrial proletariat, and on the other hand through pressure – compelled Benes to turn more toward his immediate neighbors. One of these was the USSR through its seizure of the Carpatho-Ukraine. Internally, Benes was likewise compelled to make all conceivable concessions to the agents of that closest of the great powers, the CP. If today former diplomats from Benes’ circle maintain that Benes already recognized as far back as 1945 that he had fallen into Stalin’s trap, then this is (considering what has been said above) quite credible. It is indicative of the conditions prevailing that he never, not even in the February days, undertook to counterpose his own authority to that of Stalin. Upon whom after all was he to base himself, considering that the West had approved all the measures of the bureaucratic USSR in advance?
The expulsion of the Germans, the confiscation of the property of the collaborationists, of the Hungarians, of the traitors (and of those who were so labeled) all this facilitated statification. The Stalinists took credit for the successes of this statification, which was welcomed not only by the proletariat but also by other large sectors of the popular masses. Almost all believed the end of the exploitation of man by man had come. Those who were less naive received land from the confiscated properties or became trustees of confiscated small industries or retail shops.
In addition to local administrative authorities (for whom the best term is “kleptocrats”) who had organized the robbery of the property of the Germans (which means especially also of anti-fascist proletarians), there were bad elements who enriched themselves in great numbers and who were laughed at by the people as gold-diggers but who were given a free hand by the authorities.
The elections to the first national assembly bore rich fruit for the Stalinists: in the Czech-speaking provinces they received almost 40 per cent of all votes, while Slovakia remained aloof to them. Because of its uncritical attitude – it became known as the anteroom of the CP – the SP became one of the weakest of the Czech parties, and the Benes party too remained far behind the CP in strength.
The Stalinists had utilized the year between the collapse of fascism and the first elections to occupy all the decisive posts in the state and the economy exclusively with their own people; it was a well- known fact that admission to one of the leading- posts depended upon possession of a CP membership card. The nationalization of all industries with more than 100 employees, as well as the distribution of all land of more than 100 hectares, expanded its powers still more.
At the same time the food situation was very good – not the least reason being aid by UNRRA. The non-nationalized light industry was in full swing, for the few smaller bourgeois who were left felt that this was their last chance. Since they were able to work without much overhead, they were able to pay wages above that prescribed by law. The CP began a campaign against these so-called “black wages.” The revolutionary elements in the trade- union movement – whose top ranks and apparatus was already in the hands of the Stalinists, but whose rank and file was still able to rebel – counterposed the slogan of “Black wages for all” against this CP drive.
The CP began to organize workers’ militia in the factories – that is, those already existing were built up further. The pretext for the existence of these armed bodies was to protect the shops from German revenge and from acts of sabotage. The members of the militia received full wages, without performing any other work except guard duty and engaging in military training and drills. They were therefore looked upon by the other workers with distrust.
The trade unions were gradually deprived of their democratic rights; the works councils were subjected to severe pressure from the trade-union apparatus; and an incredible law governing the election of works councils was introduced. This law provided that, if the workers of a factory disapproved of a list of candidates proposed by the trade unions, the trade-union bureaucracy had the power to appoint works councils by administrative decree. The result was that half of these official lists were rejected in all factories.
The influence of the CP was decreasing. Ever wider circles of the proletariat resisted the imposition of extra work, which was to be performed under the guise of voluntary work brigades. The introduction of a system of rationalization in the factories which was not dissimilar to the so-called Refa system under Hitler (which had given the main impetus to the resistance of the workers under the occupation) encountered decisive resistance from the workers. The rapid swelling of the state, communal and economic apparatuses, and the immense income of the “national administrators,” the directors, and the party and trade-union bureaucrats, caused widespread dissatisfaction. With infallible instinct the workers referred to this new rising stratum as the “new nobility.”
The drought of the year 1947 gave the Russian bureaucracy the opportunity to force upon Czechoslovakia an unheard-of trade agreement, which was touted by the CP as if Russia were presenting great amounts of grain as a gift. They appealed to the people to be grateful for this robbery of almost the entire industrial production. A preferential system permitted the Russians to buy export goods for the same price as did a Western buyer, and then to sell them for foreign exchange to these interested parties, while the Czechs were credited with the amount in rubles. On the other hand, goods were ordered in Czechoslovakia, the raw materials for which had to be paid in foreign exchange while Russia paid for them in rubles – or rather, these rubles were credited to the Czechs for the grain deliveries from Russia.
All these events caused a drop in the influence of the CP. The next elections would have been bound to bring it a decisive defeat. It became clearer from day to day that a coup was necessary if they were to maintain their position; that the foreign situation of Czechoslovakia did not permit a defeat of Stalinism was clear. Thus arose the February crisis.
Upon whom was the anti-CP opposition to base itself? The proletariat was without leadership; the petty bourgeoisie as well as the peasantry was incapable of action on its own. The bourgeoisie was no longer existent, with the exception of insignificant remnants. Since May 1945 capitalist production in Czechoslovakia had gradually ceased.
The congress of works councils, in which the trade- union apparatus and reliable Communist delegates had made sure of a majority for themselves, was compelled to use the Russian methods notorious since the time of the Moscow trials in order to suppress all opposition. The delegates who dared to vote against the resolution despite open voting were exposed to the sharp glare of spotlights and were yelled down as traitors by organized claques. It is no small thing that there were nevertheless eighty courageous delegates, out of 2,000, who voted against the resolution. This is especially significant since the number of those abstaining was not ascertainable.
The peasant congress, which met the next Sunday in Prague and which consisted mostly of employees of the cooperatives as well as of people who only a few months or even weeks before had received land, was a fiasco. Despite the fact that the delegates were brought to Prague in special trains and were fed and lodged free of charge the attendance was small.
But when Benes confirmed the new and almost completely CP government, thereby sanctioning and legalizing the coup, the Stalinists could no longer be ousted from their seat of power. The student groups which attempted to demonstrate against the coup were dispersed with police carbines, with the populace looking upon the massacre without making any move. There was hopeless passivity everywhere and an atmosphere of doom was general.
This atmosphere became evident with the suicide of foreign Minister Masaryk. The streets were lined with people weeping at his funeral – but neither Benes, who was to speak there, nor any other representative of the petty bourgeoisie moved as much as a finger. The police, concentrated in Prague for the security of the Stalinist power, had no occasion to intervene.
The elections, which were held in May as scheduled, were a farce. The only list of candidates, that of the government, was openly favored: anyone who dared to think of voting the white ballot against the government was labeled an agent of Hitler. Nonetheless, the result for the government was so thin that it was necessary to deprive the elections of their secret character even in the early hours of voting, and finally to falsify the very election results. Moreover there sat in every polling place an agent of the minister of the interior, taking written notice of the kind of ballot voted by each individual.
The writer of these lines broke the “unity” of one of the Prague polling places by openly voting the white list against the government. The result was that immediately after him a number of voters exhibited equal courage. Having lived in this working- class district for many years and having been well known in political circles, he was able to confirm that the result of the election had been clumsily falsified. They simply counted all the empty ballot envelopes, as well as all the torn-up lists and all those votes in which were both lists of candidates, as errors in favor of the government.
The death of Benes, as well as the suicide of Masaryk, was taken to be an act of grief; and the last flare-up of a petty-bourgeois and peasant opposition on the occasion of the Sokol congress was quickly liquidated by administrative measures against the leadership of that gymnastic society.
Already prior to February the Stalinists had attempted to strengthen their basis in the ranks of the proletariat by providing certain large plants with especially good supplies in the factory kitchens and by the allocation of special provisions of shoes and clothing. Since, however, it was just these shops which had been old strongholds of the working-class movement, it was necessary to pump fresh human material into them and to withdraw old working- class functionaries from them. After February, at any rate, they proved anything but the reliable points of support which the bureaucratic clique had hoped.
The first steps of the new government – the statification of all enterprises with more than fifty employees, the distribution of land up to fifty hectares, and the statification of the food-processing industry and of the wholesale trade – here and there perhaps still called forth certain illusions. These became intensified especially because the CP promised that if the Two Year Plan, begun in 1946, were fulfilled, there would be an increase in the standard of living by ten per cent over that of 1937, given a similar increase of production.
The Two Year Plan – “two steps to prosperity” – proved to be, however, the necessary preliminary groundwork for a complete assimilation of Czechoslovakian to Russian conditions. That this assimilation brought about a steep decline in the standard of living of the population generally and of the working class especially was a circumstance not entirely undesired by Moscow. Since Russia was able to pay only with grain, it was compelled to smash the formerly self-sufficient food-supply basis of Czechoslovakia; the highly “organized agriculture had to be “distributed,” and had to be transformed into unprofitable petty farm enterprises, rendering them uneconomical from the social point of view, if the republic was to be at the mercy of the Russians in the field of food provisions.
With this stranglehold on the throat of the Czechoslovak economy, with a powerful Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus, with the specter that the Germans might return to claim their property, it was possible to Russify the Czechoslovak economy – that is, to plunder it – without encountering the slightest resistance. If the bureaucratic Stalinist apparatus had had, prior to February, the tendency to swell in numbers, now all those who were not 100 per cent Stalinists were sent into the factories under the pretext of increasing the productive labor forces.
In this manner the social product which would have been consumed by the native bureaucracy fell to the share of the Russian bureaucracy. At any rate, the state budget for 1949 shows that the Ministry of Propaganda received an allocation 82 per cent above that of the previous year, while the Ministry for Social Welfare had to content itself with an increase of only 23 per cent, and the Ministry of Defense with only 15 per cent.
How strong the discontent is in the plants can be gathered from the complaint of the official organ of the trade unions – and thus of Minister-President Zapotocky – that the citizens have no understanding for the plan, admitting at the same time that “thousands of carloads of iron and steel are of no consequence in the eyes of those who argue about why there are no needles available.”
A new phenomenon is the “free market,” introduced on New Year’s Day of 1949. The new textile-rationing cards, which are also valid for shoe purchases, are available to only four-fifths of the population, as is admitted by the Ministry for Domestic Trade. Only those who have performed forty hours of work a week are entitled to these rations; and only intellectual workers, teachers, university professors and students are exempted from this provision. Farmers are entitled to goods available in the closed market only if their acreage does not exceed a certain maximum and if they have fulfilled their official delivery quota.
Thus this policy strikes in the first instance against the independent small entrepreneur, especially the small businessman and artisan, whom the Stalinists had, after February, not only assured their special protection, but had even written this formality into the new constitution. And there are still people in the West who believe, that it is just these strata which determine the Czech economy! It is, in this connection, perhaps worth mentioning that the Hungarian “People’s Democracy,” founded on the occasion of the third anniversary of the proclamation of the republic, which is still behind the stage of complete assimilation to Russian conditions achieved by Czechoslovakia, has made the protection of the small entrepreneur one of the first points in its program.
The open economic aim for the next period is the elimination of rationing. As a first step, the prices of rationed goods, especially of textiles and shoes, were increased fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five per cent. This Zapotocky calls “minor corrections.”
But the introduction of the free market did not fail to meet with opposition from the factories. Thus the central organ of the trade unions writes that at well-attended factory meetings there were “certain people who expressed concern lest the goods to be sold in the free market would be withdrawn from the closed economy and that thus the working people would be deprived of them.
It is especially interesting that the paper calls attention to the fact that it was necessary to explain to the workers of the AVIA works how the new price policies would redound to the great advantage of the proletariat, and that this explanation was finally “received with enthusiasm by the workers.” It was, after all, from these very works that the shop militia, which were mobilized by the Stalinists in February 1948 to take over the central secretariats of the three non-Stalinist parties, had been drawn. In the Zbrojovka (Bren gun) works, it was necessary to explain in regard to the new price policies a “number of obscure points,” and in the MEOPTA works the “initial rejection” was transformed into “full satisfaction.”
So as not to be in the position of helplessly confronting a united proletarian front, the bureaucracy attempts to drive wedges into the proletariat, to destroy its unity. The favorite means of the Russian bureaucracy, Stakhanovism, is taken over without change, and a press campaign is started in its support against “dangerous equalization.” The “free market” is to give the worker the incentive to achieve greater productivity.
Among the customers in the free textile shops there were supposed to have been (according to a report of the central organ of the CP, Rude Pravo) large numbers of workers’ wives buying baby clothing and bedding not available in the closed market. The paper further says that the open market is open to every worker who has increased his income through his increased efforts so that he is able to buy goods above and outside of his ration, and this at prices which are below those of the black market. The Prague radio, reporting on the same subject from one of the free retail shops, makes clear how gratifying all this is. One of the workers’ wives, speaking over the microphone, says that she has just bought her working daughter a pair of panties at 250 kronen (half a week’s wages of a skilled worker) – they were quite expensive but the girl couldn’t run around without panties, after all!
Years ago we wrote on another occasion that Stalinism – which at that time denied that it wanted to export Communism – could only ship its own bureaucratic methods abroad. This has come true to a monstrous extent in all the border countries.
In the Czechoslovakian administration bureaucratic intervention can be felt as much as or even more than in the economy. Since the administration of the provinces gave certain possibilities of autonomy to the Slovaks, Stalinism won a new victory by splitting up the administration into nineteen county executives. The chairmen of these provincial executives of the counties are in possession of almost unlimited powers; they can invalidate decisions of the plenary sessions of the committees just as they can annul measures of individual department chiefs if these seem to be in contradiction with Stalinist policy. Not one of these chairmen is elected. All are appointed by the Stalinist Ministry of the Interior – that is, the secret police – and all nineteen are, of course, members of the CP.
The working class, under these conditions, not only withdraws itself from politics but also abstains from trade-union work. Time and again there are competitions organized between various organizations of the party or of the trade unions aiming at bringing more members down for an evening; and not even the performance of an entertaining film or of vaudeville acts seems to be able to increase attendance. The scorn and wrath of the working class is more likely to make itself felt spontaneously.
Thus there are many measures taken by the Stalinists and they remain apparently unopposed, but this should not lead to the conclusion that the proletariat agrees with them. Even such a monstrous act as the call to “socialist competition” issued by the county health insurance office in Nove Meste in Moravia a competition to see which health insurance office recognizes fewer workers who report themselves sick causes a noticeable storm of protest.
To be sure, the working class has been disarmed; but it resists and it is capable of resistance, even though it cannot liberate itself and, in the absence of a firmly rooted opposition party and leadership, withdraws into deep passivity.
Open opposition is thus offered only by romantic youth, frenzied petty bourgeois and, now and then, individual peasants. Since these forces lack any mass base and, as a class, possess no strength of their own, their efforts remain isolated. They can be suppressed through the usual police and court methods. It would be wrong to bank upon them since they are unable to counterpose to Stalinism anything but a purely negative program: that is, they know exactly what they do not want but not what they would like to have.
The restoration of private capitalism today is not a program with which, in Czechoslovakia, one could lure a dog from behind a warm stove. Moreover, there seem to be only very small remnants of the bourgeoisie left still speculating on it.
The struggle for the democratic rights of the workers and the peasants, the struggle for the control of the statified industry, the struggle against the Russian bureaucracy, the police terror, the privileges of the members of the “new nobility” – this can only be led by the working class itself; when the time comes it will find the full support of the middle strata in this struggle.
To expect that the isolated Czech working class, without the aid of a strong proletarian movement in the West, should be able to shake off the yoke of Stalinism means to succumb to illusions. As little as the German proletariat after its defeat by Hitler was able to liberate itself, as little can the proletariat of the border countries do more than prepare its liberation, stiffen its resistance against Gottwald and Stalin and, for the rest, hope for a new socialist movement in the West. The longer the waiting period not only for the Czech proletarians but of the working classes of all the border countries, the harder will be the liberation, the smaller the resisting socialist cadres, the greater the danger of a counter-revolutionary solution.
Beginning of February 1949
Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 23 August 2018
Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 23 August 2018