with the September elections. Czechoslovakia stood out but the secretary-general of the Czech Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, soon had a plan ready. There were two possible routes to takeover. Power might simply, Bolshevik- fashion, be seized. But that would be too obvious, and would shock western European opinion. Better ‘Trojan Horse’ tactics, infiltrating the enemy parties. That programme now went ahead.
It was helped by circumstances — the harsh winter, followed by a severe drought, made for discontent, and there was a fall in exports (even food was imported from the Soviet Union). There was also much grumbling among the intelligentsia, whose wages had fallen quite drastically whereas elsewhere, as the economy recovered, there were patches of prosperity. The Communists blamed the machinations of ‘capitalism’ and the effects of the Marshall meeting; they proposed to head these off with a tax on ‘millionaires’ but suffered an early and misleading defeat. The other parties, recognizing it to be futile, blocked it, and the block succeeded because the Communists had not yet established their own manipulable element among the Social Democrats. On 10 September came a mysterious development: the despatch of parcel bombs to three prominent non-Communist ministers, including the one responsible for Justice, Dr Prokop Drtina. But the essential manoeuvre came over Slovakia. There, the Communist- controlled Secret Service discovered an alleged conspiracy, of exiled ‘Fascists’ colluding with Democrats. There followed 450 arrests, and the trade unions went into action to demand a suppression of the Slovak governors. They were replaced by a commission, in which the ‘organizations’ were represented; and though there was of course opposition in Slovakia, it was in some degree divided by religion (Catholic and Lutheran) and in any case could not challenge the police and the trade unions, who muzzled the media. Later on, the archives of all of this became open, and were written up in somewhat surreal circumstances by Karel Kaplan, who revealed that there had been spies, known in code (agent V101 etc.), in the Catholic ranks. Slovakia had been corralled by November, and there was a great block of opinion in the Czech lands that now saw the Communists as guarantors of the unity of the country against the treacherous Slovaks. Especially, a decisive element among the Social Democrats drifted towards the Communist side, and was led by one of the wartime chieftains, Zdenek Fierlinger, who had probably been a Communist agent all along. Meanwhile, in Prague, there were barrages of Communist propaganda, and displays of ‘the organized discontent of the masses’, and these hundreds of thousands of people, complete with threatening banderoles, were imposing enough. How were the non-Communists to respond?
In January 1948 a provocation was carefully set up. The parcel bomb incident was investigated by the police, at the behest of the Minister of Justice, Dr Drtina (in his memories, he is, Austrian-fashion, punctilious about recording the title ‘Dr’, even when applied to executed war criminals or Communist agents). They dragged their feet, and did so insultingly, as Czech officials knew very well how to do; the incident was used too as an excuse to plant ‘bodyguards’ on the non-Communist ministers, and the state security service by now contained men who had been given a Soviet training. Drtina’s investigation led towards two police officials, whose arrest by the Minister of the Interior (and police) he now demanded. The affair reached the cabinet, and its chairman, Klement Gottwald, refused to act. We know the sequel from both sides — memoirs on the one, secret archives on the other. Stalin advised confrontation, once he was assured by Gottwald that the Red Army would not have to intervene, and he flew into Prague his long-term Czech expert, the former ambassador Valerian Zorin. On their side, the non- Communist ministers talked to the American and British ambassadors, and conferred among themselves or with President Benes. Benes told them not to risk a battle, but they themselves wanted one, in the expectation that early elections would be called, which, given the Marshall Plan as support, they would win. In fact elections were due that May, but Drtina and his friends feared that the Communists, being in charge of the arrangements, would bring off the sort of coup that had worked in Poland, with the fraudulent referendum. So they forced a crisis, and resigned. If a majority of the ministers had resigned from the government and from the National Front especially, there would indeed, formally, have been a government crisis, compelling Benes to act. On 18 February they threatened to resign, and on 20 February twelve of the twenty-six ministers did indeed do so.
This was not a majority. The Social Democrat Fierlinger stayed on, and so, fatally, did the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk. In his way, he represented the tragedy of the Czechs: vastly talented, an excellent linguist, a good pianist, a bibulous charmer with a long string of affairs and funny stories, and contacts all over the world; but in the end a weak and selfish man, the shadow of his far tougher father, the founder of the republic. Benes was very ill, not likely to live much longer; the last thing that he now wanted was any kind of crisis. He would bow to force, whether that now shown by the Communists with their militias in the street, or by the Red Army; he dressed this up with reference to the West, which he alleged was forcing him to choose between Germany, which he hated, and Russia. Jan Masaryk thought that he would be Benes’s successor, and stayed on. Gottwald could hardly believe his luck and said, ‘At first I couldn’t believe it would be so easy. But it turned out that they had resigned. I prayed that this stupidity would go on and that they wouldn’t change their minds.’ They did not. Gottwald now had an opening, to nominate men to the National Front who would replace the resigning ministers, and were ostensibly from the same parties. Thus the Catholic (People’s) Party leader, an aged priest, Dr Jan Sramek, was replaced by a colleague, Mgr Josef Plojhar, who had been in Mauthausen and no doubt learned, there, to co-operate with Communists; and there were stooge Radicals or Social Democrats as well. The way was clear for Gottwald to proclaim the Communist takeover, which he did, overlooking the statue of Jan Huss from the balcony of the Kinsky Palace on Old Town Square, on 25 February.
Poor Drtina had tried to make amends, saying the day before that ‘the most important guarantee of security rests in close collaboration with the USSR’. But it was too late, and two days later he tried to commit suicide, in a manner befitting the native tradition, by jumping out of the window. Badly broken, he was kept in hospital for a while and then imprisoned, spending long years in this or that castle dungeon, often together with German war criminals or Slovak Fascists whom he himself, in his great days as minister for ‘retribution’, had sentenced. In 1960 there was at last an amnesty and he was released, staying on in Prague until his death, aged eighty, in 1980. The new Communist regime showed its character in other cases. The aged Sramek, a tough old peasant-priest who had spent the war years as part of the exile government in London, tried to escape on a French aircraft and was held at the airport. He too faced years of dungeon and prison, dying, aged eighty-four, in 1956. Jan Masaryk had a fate all his own. He stayed on as foreign minister, living alone in the official flat at the top of the Czernin Palace, the foreign ministry building (which had also housed the Nazi Protectorate staff). On 12 March he was found splayed on the road, below the bathroom window of that flat. Suicide? Murder? No-one knew, and neither the investigation of the time, nor a subsequent investigation by an American journalist twenty years later, when witnesses were still alive and evidence still warm, cleared up the matter. There were signs of a struggle in the bedroom, and there was blood all over the bathroom, which had only a small window, through which it would have been very difficult to manoeuvre Masaryk, a big man. Perhaps the affair can be explained by drugs. LSD, which had been discovered in Switzerland at the end of the 1930s, can cause a sort of birth trauma: a foetus, struggling inside the womb, then making, head- first, for a small opening through which it has to fight its way. Jan Masaryk, a fashionable thirties figure, probably used the then fashionable drugs of high society in the West, and, no doubt demoralized by what he had done and what had happened to his friends and colleagues, this time overdid the dose. He could have saved his country if he had been less vain. As things were, he deserved the epithet uttered by a celebrated British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who had known him in London, and who knew (from a year in Moscow) his Communists: the window dressing fell out of the window. Benes himself lingered on for a month or two at his country retreat, then died. In Czechoslovakia, the barbed wire went up along the frontiers, complete with barking dogs, watch-towers, minefields and searchlights — ‘the Iron Curtain’ that Churchill had spoken of. A peculiarly harsh and durable version of Communism descended and Prague acquired an enormous statue of Stalin, on a bluff above the river. It was the start of a military confrontation of East and West.
The Czech coup went together with a further Stalinization of the Soviet bloc. In Hungary, the preceding September, there had been a sort of parade ground version of a fraudulent election, complete with dummy parties, useful idiots and double voting; the unlovely Rakosi had taken over, and the Socialists were forced into union with the Communists. This, and the Berlin blockade, caused blood at last to flow through the bureaucratic arteries of western Europe, and ideas of unity began to take shape.
The British had even supported a Western Union, complete with a Council of Europe and a Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. The motive was essentially anti-Communist, to lay down guidelines that would prevent governments from putting citizens into camps. There was a grand meeting of a ‘Congress of Europe’ in May 1948, with over 700 delegates from thirteen countries, graced with the presence of anti-Fascist warhorses and of course the lionized Churchill. Parliaments sent delegates to the Council of Europe which then emerged. However, there was no economic content to this. At the time, the British were trying to revitalize their empire, and concentrated above all on dollar-earning exports; the French had their Plan, of which fuel was a vital component — whether through
