3 - The national revolution

Summary

As the new government was welcomed back to Prague so organs of the new Czechoslovakia were establishing their authority over the territory of the state. Officially the government was to be subject to alteration and a Provisional National Assembly was to be created as quickly as possible. In practice the ‘transition period’ lasted almost six months and in the meantime many revolutionary measures were implemented. Generally this was referred to as the ‘national revolution’ and the term is adopted here. Its guiding document was the Košice Programme, which received exceptionally wide publicity, although many comments even by leading politicians suggest that its actual contents were rarely remembered exactly. It could anyway not be a precise blueprint for the revolution: it quickly became clear that in some fields it was not being applied rigorously while in others the revolutionary changes went further than had been laid down.

This complex revolutionary process cannot be reduced to terms of one class taking power from another, as Czechoslovak historians especially in the early 1950s felt obliged to do, and neither can it be reduced to the perfidious acts of Communists in subverting Czechoslovak society as was implied by a number of émigré writers in the same period. Both of those approaches grossly oversimplify what took place and neither provides a sound basis for understanding the subsequent evolution of Czechoslovak society. That does not mean that there was no social content to the revolution or that the Communist Party did not have an extremely important role, but it does mean that the revolution cannot be reduced entirely to such simplistic terms.