the Western plans for Germany and the commu-
nist coup in Czechoslovakia.
From Moscow’s point of view the Czech coup
could not have been worse timed. The govern-
ment crisis in Prague lasted from 20 to 27
February 1948, at the very time when the Western
foreign ministers were meeting in London.
Communism was showing its most unacceptable
face. Moscow seemed, so it was thought in the
West, bent on ruthless expansion and the suppres-
sion of freedom. The end of Czech democracy was
bloodily marked by Jan Masaryk’s fall to his death
from his study window. Whether the popular
Czech foreign minister had been pushed, or
whether he had deliberately chosen this dramatic
suicide as a gesture to the world, will never be
known. A few months later, the other monument
of free Czechoslovakia, President Eduard Benesˇ,
also died. All he had striven for lay in ruins.
Was there really a planned communist coup or
had the opponents of the communists miscalcu-
lated? Were they in fact responsible for what hap-
pened? In one sense they were. The Czech
government was a broad coalition which included
some communists, not least the prime minister,
Klement Gottwald. But the February crisis was
neither ordered by Moscow nor initiated by
Gottwald. The ministers opposed to the commu-
nists had resigned and Gottwald replaced them
with communists. With a general election due in
the summer of 1948, it appeared that the com-
munist opposition had committed political
suicide and that there had been no coup as was
claimed in the West at the time. But appearances
are misleading.
During the winter of 1947–8, both in the
Cabinet and in parliament tension between the
communists and their opponents had led to
increasingly bitter conflict. The communist
minister of the interior, protected by the com-
munist prime minister, illegally extended his
powers; the security apparatus and police were
being transformed into instruments of the
Communist Party, endangering basic civic free-
doms. The non-communist ministers protested
and insisted on bringing to book the offending
communists in the government. But the commu-
nist ministers countered by threatening to use
force and, in order to avoid defeat in parliament,
mobilised groups of their supporters in the
country. The communist-dominated workers’
factory councils met in Prague on 22 February- It was intended that their well-orchestrated
demands should provide the pretext for forcing
out the non-communist government supporters.
But twelve non-communist ministers chose to
anticipate Gottwald’s manoeuvre. When, on 20
February, the communist interior minister refused
to reinstate eight non-communist senior police
officers despite a majority vote of the Cabinet in
favour of doing so, they resigned. The normal
constitutional procedure would have been for
them to continue in a caretaker government.
President Benesˇ was expected to, and at first did,
insist that no new government could be formed
which did not include ministers representing the
parties that were not communist. If Benesˇ had
held to this line, Gottwald’s communist ministers
would not then have been able to form a gov-
ernment; the only non-violent way out of the
deadlock for them would have been either to give
way to the non-communists or to risk defeat in a
general election which would have had to have
been brought forward. That would not have
given the communists enough time to rig the
elections. The opponents of the communists cal-
culated that early elections were the best guaran-
tee of preserving democracy in Czechoslovakia;
the longer they waited, the less possible it would
be for the non-communist parties to campaign
freely, since the interior minister was subverting
the impartiality of the police and placing com-
munists in key positions. Thus it was in the inter-
ests of the supporters of democracy to bring the
crisis to a head quickly. Admittedly it was a des-
perate throw and the democrats lost.
Gottwald proved to be tough and utterly ruth-
less. He resorted to a show of violence in Prague.
Armed militia and the police took over Prague;
communist demonstrations were mounted; an
anti-communist student demonstration was bro-
ken up. ‘Action committees’ were organised
throughout the country to carry through a purge
of opponents of communism. The ministries of
the non-communist ministers were occupied, civil
servants dismissed and the ministers prevented