The forgotten plan: the Czechoslovak two year plan in a European context, 1939-1989

My dissertation, The Forgotten Plan: The Czechoslovak Two Year Plan in a European Context, 1939-1989, zeroes in on the Two Year Plan, a form of socialist economic planning and national reconstruction that was put in place in Czechoslovakia from 1946 to 1948. I argue that the Two Year Plan was a critical moment in the history of economic planning and state formation in postwar Europe. It had a significant influence on the geopolitical position of Czechoslovakia in the fraught outbreak of the Cold War and it profoundly shaped Czechoslovakia’s relations with the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Belying its current obscurity, the Plan continued to influence Czechoslovak politics and rhetoric at the time of the Communist takeover and over the course of the Cold War.