Jiří Pernes Specifická cesta KSČ k socialismu Fikce, nebo realita?
The Czechoslovakia Communist Party’s Own Road to Socialism: Fact or Fiction?

Summary/Abstract: In this analysis of the strategy and tactics of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948, the author considers how, in its policies, the Party applied the notion of the so-called ‘special road’ of liberated Czechoslovakia to a Socialist system. He asks how, after the Second World War, the Party could gain such mass support. He sees one of the reasons for its success in its pragmatically and fl exibly choosing strategy and using the heightened popular national feeling in combination with the widely acknowledged ideal of social justice. The historical roots of the Czech notion of the country’s distinctive orientation towards socialism and its attractiveness, argues the author, are in the second half of the nineteenth century, when left-wing and nationalist ideas were promoted and linked together in Czech society and politics. Their symbiosis then had a strong effect during the whole existence of the fi rst republic. The Chairman of the Party, Klement Gottwald (1896–1953), like other members of the leadership, described the contemporary situation after May 1945 as a ‘national and democratic revolution’ and the ‘building of a people’s democracy’, in which, however, the accent was on their special character. The author fi nds the fi rst use of the slogan ‘the Czechoslovak road to socialism’ in speeches of Communist Party representatives in autumn 1946, and he considers the decisive moment for its formulation to be the victory of the Communist Party in the general elections of May 1946, when the top-level members of the Party convinced themselves that it was possible to remake Czechoslovakia into a Socialist state by following a peaceful road of increasingly radical reforms, without the violence or ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ of the Soviet model. In practice this idea was expressed in the slogan about the struggle to win over the majority of the nation, which was meant to ensure the Communist Party more than fi fty per cent of the vote in the next elections. The author points to the importance of the international context, particularly the attitudes of Moscow, which, as Stalin said, declared that it agreed to the notion of different roads leading to socialism in different countries, depending on the local circumstances in each. The fundamental turnaround in Kremlin policy in summer and autumn 1947, refl ected particularly in the founding of the Cominform (Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties), was projected into the strategy of the Czechoslovak Communist Part, when, in the struggle for power, it began, in addition to elections, to plan alternative approaches using pressure and violence. Ultimately these were effectively employed in the February 1948 takeover, which the author examines from the viewpoint of reports by Soviet diplomats and bureaucrats. Though the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership did not explicitly reject the Czechoslovak road to socialism, after the Soviet-Yugoslav split and the establishment of a more hard-line course by the Kremlin in autumn 1948, it completely abandoned the Czechoslovak road and adopted the Soviet model of Socialism. The author sums up by saying that although the superfi cial and undeveloped concept of the Czechoslovak road did indeed exist for a while in Czechoslovak Communist Party policy, it was only intended for the purpose of taking power peacefully and was essentially a tactic to make the road to Communist dictatorship appear democratic. The author concludes with the Soviet document ‘O nekotorykh oshibkakh v deyatelnosti Kommunisticheskoy partii Chekhoslovakii’ (Concerning some mistakes in the activity of the Czechoslovak Communist Party), presented here in Czech translation as a supplement to the article. The author demonstrates the importance of the document by discussing particular changes in Czechoslovak Communist Party policy in accord with Soviet ideas. This long text, highly critical of the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, was drawn up by three offi cials of the apparat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), L. Baranov, V. Moshetov, and A. Antipov, on 5 April 1948, for Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov (1902–1982), the head of the foreign policy department of the Central Committee. (The document was published in Russian in T. V. Volokitina et al. (eds), Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiiskikh arkhivov 1944–1953 gg., vol. 1: 1944–1948 gg. Moscow and Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf, 1997, pp. 831–58.) The report focuses on several areas – Party strategy in the power struggle and its declared aims, the internal building up of the Party, nationalities policy and agricultural policy –, and it reproaches the Czechoslovak leadership for a number of mistakes and shortcomings. The report sees the greatest mistake in the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s orientation to a peaceful road to Socialism without class struggle or victims, in its overrating of parliamentary forms of struggle and underestimating the importance of the revolutionary rising up of the masses. It also criticizes the mass expansion of the membership base of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which it considers to be a rejection of the 266 Soudobé dějiny XXIII / 1–2 Bolshevik principles of the organizational building up of the Party. The report condemns the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (and other parties before the February takeover) for its nationalities policy when dealing with the German and the Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia, because the leadership ignored Leninist-Stalinist approaches to this question. The Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, according to the authors of the report, were guilty of similar deviations on the peasant question, because it had failed to work out a ‘scientifi c’ solution and did not strike at the very foundations of capitalism in the villages. In the conclusion of the report, the authors state that the Czechoslovak Communist Party should have re-examined its theoretical starting points and practical policy, and they set out the terms and conditions that the leadership had to meet in order to rectify the situation in the Marxist-Leninist spirit.

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