How the Czech Stalii Mass Movement of 1

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councils sprang up in the struggle to defeat Nazi occupiers How much were the Czech working class involved in the overturn of capitalist property relations that took place under Stalinist control in the post-war period?

Certainly Czechoslovakia was the country in Eastern Europe in which there was the greatest amount of mass mobilisation at the time.

This was facilitated by the comparatively large size and long history of the two Communist Parties-the Czech CP and the Slovak CP -which were the mass parties of the working class.

Yet Bloomfield describes the overturn as a 'Passive Revolution" because, he says, the working class was a "willing accomplice" • and not the driving force in the expropriation of capital and the transformation of the old state machine.

He comes to this assessment partly because of his own Stalinist political standpoint. He examines the attitudes of the working class in relation to the lead given by the Stalinist party leaders in their bureaucratic moves towards the overturn of capitalism: he does not analyse the political development of the Czechoslovakian working class in relation to the possibilities for revolutionary mobilisation and a genuine socialist revolution, which were present from 1945 onwards.

Indeed while academics feel able to look at various real and imaginary models of socialist transformationthe October revolution; the East European overturns; the Chinese revolution; the Cuban revolution; the Supposed "parliamentary cad"-and choose their :a0:00e evolutionaries are 10: jective possile: = es:= situation.

In Czechoslovakia there was enormous potentia scope for revolutionary intervention. The masses were involved from the outset in the military defeat of the German state power, and militancy increased towards the end of the war.

On May 5, 1945, 80,000 people helped build barricades in Prague University and carry through a major uprising. And this mass mobilisation lasted right through to the 200,000strong demonstration in February 1948 at the point where the Czech CP took complete control.

Such mass involvement was not to take place in other East European countries, even though the Kremlin bureaucracy exercised its control in the main through the national CPs.

It was not therefore the action of the masses in Czechoslovakia that was decisive in the overturn of capitalist property relations: it was an expressioon on the one hand of the anticapitalist feeling of, the masses, and of the willingness of the Czech CP to utilise this for its own purposes.

But of course there could be no question of the Soviet bureaucracy assisting a fullsanded socialist reovlution = me the formation of misin-el. soviets as independent organs of working class power: atter all,. the Stalinist bureaucracy had themselves liquidated the power of the soviets in order to consolidate their own power and privilege as a ruling caste in the USSR itself.

For the Kremlin leaders to allow the full independent mobilisation of the Czech working class on the borders of the USSR would open up pressures towards political revolution amongst Russian Czechoslovak workers workers.

The Czech CP itself however could be relied upon to oppose any such developments. It was a complete tool of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

The Gottwald leadership had been installed by the Comintern in 1929-and had obediently followed every instruction from Moscow.

Yet even this Stalin at Yalta in 1945 clearly came under considerable pressure. There was in post-war Czechoslovakia-as throughout the East European countries-a large influx of membership into the CP.

While much of this recruitment would have been careerist elements, the growth in these parties also coincided with massive growth of CPs in Western Europe: it reflected the radicalisation of layers of who turned towards the CPs looking for a means of fighting for Communism.

Yet they found only bureaucratiser appendages f Kremlin foreien policyparties that were to be ruth lessly purged o genuine militants and possible dissident layers of the bureau cracy in the late 1940s anc early 1950s.

The process oi the aweiturn in Czechoslovakia i3n be approximately divided into two phases: irom 194547. and from Autumn 1947 February 1948.

Yet there were elements of the second period in the first, which marked the moves by the Moscow bureaucracy to halt revolutionary struggles in Czechoslovakia.

Bloomfield points out that the policy: of Internal Central Commil of the Czech CP December 1944 was tl "The Czechoslo people must liberate thi selves and not await pass ly the arrival of the I Army. Obviously co-ord tion with the advancing I Army was essential. Yet internal leadership laid gi stress in the need to aro mass actions in opposit to the Nazi occupat which would culminate an armed uprising" (p.33 But Moscow's direct: were rather differe Gottwald and the exter Czech CP leadership resistance activity as sim "complementary to requirements of the ads cing Red Army" (p.33).

In March 1945 a con ence took place at Czech embassy in Mosc in which the four par that were to form National Front • coalit government were brou together to discuss af gramme.

The government was be a "Popular Front" workers' parties along capitalist parties.

When it took off Moseow's hand was again: all of the key gov mental positions allotted the CP were taken

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This is the second, concluding, article by TONY RICHARDSON on t Passive Revolution by Jon Bloomfield • The article also examines some wider issues the book raises in relatio post-war overturns of capitalism inder leadership in the Eastern European 'ful coexistence with impérialism, however, the Stalinist bureaucracy are forced continuously to readjust their stance as the balance of