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Of all the famous "eights' which punctuate recent Czechoslovak history (1918, the creation of the Czechoslovak state, to its collapse at Munich in 1938, and its take-over by the Communists in 1948) there remains one which is often ignored though essential to the understanding of the others: it is 1928 and the so-called "bolshevisation" of the Communist Party, completed in February 1929 with Gottwald's 'seizure of power" at the Vth Congress of the Party. The "bolshevisation" was to ensure the total subordination of the Czechoslovak Party to the Comintern, which by then was primarily a tool of Stalin's foreign policy. From then on the attitude of the Czechoslovak Communists towards the state, towards the very idea of Czechoslovak statehood and its crisis in the 1930s, became subordinated to the Great Power interests of the Soviet Union. Yet it emerged between 1938 and 1945 as the great champion of the Czechoslovak state; a vital ingredient in its bid for power after the Second World War.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10644-8_10

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