Czechoslovakia: the N

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On May 9, 1945 Soviet troops liberated Prague from the fascists and were greeted by popular acclaim by the Czechoslovak masses.

"In Czechoslovakia the approach of the Red Army launched a general revolutionary upsurge: occupation of the factories, establishment of plant committees to run the factories, creation of Councils (a kind of Soviet) which gathered into their hands all political authority, concentration of all arms in the hands of the workers' militia...

But by August 20, 1968, ten years ago this week, the Red Army re-entered Czechoslovakia under very different conditions-with the objective of propping up the tottering Stalinist bureaucracy and forestalling any move to political independence by the working class.

Acute This move both symtomised and itself worsened the acute political crisis of Stalinism in the post-war period. It must be understood in its proper context.

Stalinist policy in Czechoslovakia, however, had always been fundamentally opposed to the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class.

Even at the height of the spontaneous upsurge that greeted the Red Army in 1945, Czech Communist Party • leader Gottwald, speaking in the month of liberation to a confidential meeting of Stalinist bureaucrats, declared that:

"We must continu illy remindi ourselves that in the present phase, we are following the line of the national and democratic and not the line of the social revolution.

Bourgeois coalition

Sooner than base themselves on the revolutionary councils created by the working class, the Stalinists deliberately restored the power of the discredited bourgeois parties and established a bourgeois coalition government in Czechoslovakia-as indeed they did throughout all the Eastern European "Buffer" states that had been liberated by the Red Army or by CP-led partisans during the war.

Stalin had no plan to carry through social transformations in these countries, which were to be used as bargaining counters in the post-war division of the world into "peacefully coexisting" spheres of influence between the Soviet Union and the imperialist powers.

Nor did he have any wish to see revolutionary struggles overthrow capitalism and assert the independence of the working class on the very borders of the Soviet Union itself.

Measure of control

Such struggles would inevitably have an impact on the Russian working class and possibly spur them into struggles against the parasitic Kremlin bureaucracy in the fight for politicThe formation of bourgeois coalition governments under the watchful eye of the Red Army and including top Stalinist bureaucrats offered Stalin the chance to exert a measure of control over the "Buffer" states and at the same time stem the revolutionary struggles of the masses.

But the stabilisation of such regimes was not a straightforward matter. A series of nationalisations was necessary-to restore to production industry previously owned by the Germans or to provide a pretext to end workers' occupations, and restore the old capitalist managers.

In Czechoslovakia the bourgeoisie actually hailed the nationalisations law as a victory which transferred the industries from the hands of the workers to the hands of the state.

In 1947, however, the development of the "Cold War" between the imperialist powers and the Soviet Union forced a new development the "Buffer" countries.

Stalin became suddenly deeply mistrustful of the bourgeois parties in the Buffer coalitions as a possible source of anti-Soviet agitation, and a process of consolidation of Stalinist control began.

Further steps were taken to destroy the social and economic hold of the bourgeoisie, to establish monolithic and bureaucratised Stalinist parties, and to ensure in each country the interpenetration of the : ate apparatus and the Comn unist Party.

In Czechoslovakia, the most politically and socially advanced country of the Buffer Zone, this process was completed last of all.

Indeed so thoroughly had the Stalinists re-established the bourgeois order and ensured the freedom of the bourgeois parties in the period of coalition that they were forced to the lengths of a coup in February 1948, with a controlled mobilisation of the working class being utilised to establish the unchallenged power of the Stalinist party. On May 9, 1948, Czechoslovakia adopted a new constitution modelled on that of the Soviet Union.

By 1949, when the first five-year-plan was launched, 96% of industrial workers in Czechoslovakia were employed in the nationalised sector of the economy.

The consolidation of the power of the Stalinist parties in the "Buffer" states was accompanied by a ruthless purge of potential opponents of Kremlin control.

In Czechoslovakia colossal 550,000 were purged from the Communist Party which itself was the biggest political party in the country.

Among those purged were any elements whose roots in the masses might make them responsive to pressure for action independent of the Kremlin, and equip them to lead a break from Stalin's control. A further guarantee of the subservience and reactionary line of the Stalinist parties was their wholesale merger in many cases with the social democratic parties-whose reformist bureaucracy was experienced and dependable at taking instructions from above. In Czechoslovakia this merger took place in June 1948.

At each point of the social transformation of the 'Buffer" states the main criterion followed by the Stalinists was to hold back the slightest independence of the working class and ensure that control rested in the hands of the huge and growing party/state bureaucracy.

In Czechoslovakia the number of state officials more than doubled from a pre-war total of 345,000 to a 1956 staff of 792,000.

The bureaucracy in this way extended itself to the point where it became a social layer significant in size as well as in its political control of the nationalised At the end of 1952 the former CP General Secretary Rudolf Slansky was framed, "tried" and hanged in Prague on charges which included "Trotskyism" "'Titoism" "Zionism" and conspiracy By JOHN with western intelligence services.

From then on, for a prolonged period, under the seasoned bureaucratic leadership of Gottwald and then Novotny, the Czechoslovak bureaucracy appeared to have stabilised itself in the saddle, even while crises wracked the Stalinist apparatus throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

"Concessions"

In 1950 and 1951 a wave of strikes in the Stalinist prison camps of Vorkuta and Karaganda in the USSR had had to be put down by vicious military action, and had given a stark warning to the Kremlin bureaucrats.

As a result, when Stalin died in 1953 the bureaucracy saw the necessity to make some cosmetic "concessions" to the growing hostility of the working class.

Thousands of prisoners were released, and Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, was arrested and shot, to create the illusion of a 'new' regime.

The anxiety of the bureaucracy was increased by the upsurge of the workers of East Berlin in June 1953, in a general strike movement that demonstrated the weakness of the regime and which was only suppressed by the direct and brutal intervention of the Red Army. ' Incréasingly the Stalinists felt obliged to adopt the tactic of superficial "liberalisation" and token econom-