IDEOLOGICALLY EDUCATIONAL WORK OF CZECHOSLOVAK SOCIALISTS. PROBING LIFE WITHIN THE CZECHOSLOVAK SOCIALIST PARTY BETWEEN 1948 AND 1989

The 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia radically reshaped the country’s party-political system, which had already been disrupted in 1945 by the decision to ban right-wing political parties, but had nevertheless remained workable even in its curtailed form. The party-political system in place between 1948 and 1989 might be described as essentially a one-party regime, given that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia held a dominant position within it after establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, it did allow for the existence of five other political parties, four of which (following the absorption of the Social Democrats) were able to engage in activity. The Communists made this concession in an attempt to create the impression internationally that the new political regime in Czechoslovakia was democratic. Those political parties that were permitted to exist could do so on condition that they endorsed the programme for the building of socialism and were supervised by the Communist-led National Front (NF), which dictated their activities and exercised control over them. The Czechoslovak Socialist Party (ČSS), which was founded in 1948 as the successor to the reformist and, in terms of its membership base, middle-class Czechoslovak National Socialist Party, was tasked by the Communists with winning over the middle class, social groupings of small businessmen, craftsmen, tradesmen, small private farmers, employees, civil servants, and a section of the intelligentsia, all of which the Communist Party had found it difficult to infiltrate. The ČSS undertook this mission by setting up a sophisticated system of instruction and education that operated both at the level of the party’s headquarters and further down its organisational structure, with the aim of bringing under its influence all members of the party, starting with its presidium, central committee, parliamentarians, and members of the party apparatus, and ending with rank-and-file party members and those interested in joining it. The central political school in Javorník, as the capstone of the entire structure, was given the mission to organise educational modules – including short-term courses, residential training, and multi-year schools for external students – that would groom suitable candidates to be party officials involved in party work and the activities of the NF and its branches. One yardstick for judging the success of this intra-party training was the scale of party members’ engagement in socialist building activities in their workplaces (their involvement in the “improvement” and “invention” movements, the socialist labour brigades, the shock worker movement, pledges to exceed production quotas, etc.), in positions within the party, in national (read: local administration) committees, in NF organisations, and in voluntary brigades, e.g. in the execution of NF electoral programmes, environmental protection, resource extraction, blood donation, etc. All the party’s ideological efforts were directed at combating the “national socialism syndrome” that weighed heavily on the ČSS’s existence. Party members were made to understand that there was only one revolutionary path to socialism and that it could only exist in a single form – the Soviet one.