Stalin led Gottwald to drink

In January 1951, a team of top-level Czechoslovak communist functionaries was summoned to the Kremlin for a series of top-secret meetings with Soviet dictator J.V. Stalin and other high-ranking party officials.

As they boarded the plane, the three members of the delegation did not have any information about the organization of the meeting or the nature of the talks. Then-Defense Minister Alexej Čepička - who together with Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) Secretary General Rudolf Slánský and functionary Bedřich Geminder comprised the trio - expected a summit that would give Warsaw Pact countries an opportunity to exchange information and discuss military issues.

Instead, Čepička and his colleagues were subjected to a four-day chastisement by a leery Stalin and his henchmen, who reportedly considered Czechoslovakia "the weakest link" in the Eastern bloc.

"Those three were in shock. The Soviets did not allow them to get a word in, so they just listened to how the political conditions in the Czechoslovak Army, in the entire state, were unreliable and the combat efficiency of the armed forces was low," said historian František Hanzlík from Brno's University of Defense (UO), who recently unearthed the surprising information in the National Archive.

Marked as "strictly classified," the two documents - a 1951 report by Čepička and a 1963 report by  communist statesman Zdeněk Fierlinger - point to the USSR's continuous distrust of the Czechoslovak communist apparatus and shed new light on President Klement Gottwald's subservient relationship with his Moscow counterparts.

During the initial intensity of the Cold War, the Soviet leadership appeared fully convinced that Europe lay on the brink of a third world war. "The postwar balance of power in Europe is evidently inclined in our favor, and we cannot allow it to be weakened," wrote Čepička, paraphrasing Stalin. "We believe that this advantage is limited to five years. … It is necessary to prepare our countries and armies for combat in four to five years at the latest."

To enable these preparations, the USSR pressured its satellite states to cleanse their governments and armies of unreliable figures and reorient their economies to wartime production. For Stalin, who saw Czechoslovakia as instrumental, both geopolitically and due to its highly developed industry, ensuring political obedience in the country was essential, Čepička wrote.

The principal reason for Stalin's distrust of Czechoslovakia hinged on the reports of the country's own functionaries. Although the draconian political processes of 1948-53 had by 1951 already "cleansed" the Czechoslovak Army of hundreds of soldiers whose backgrounds or political persuasions clashed with the KSČ agenda, the army could not function without leaving certain unchecked officers in place. According to Hanzlík, this led a handful of high-up communist officials, whose hard-line political  persuasion bordered on fanaticism, to regularly issue separate reports to Russia on the "political unreliability" and imperialist convictions of the country's military leadership.

Adding to the Soviets' wariness, according to Čepička, was the KSČ's refusal to accept Russian military aid when the party overthrew Czechoslovakia's democratic government in the February 1948 coup. "We are the only country besides Bulgaria that does not house Soviet troops," he wrote. "Not even in the February events of 1948 did we request military aid, even though they considered the situation critical and offered it to us."

Čepička conjectured that these suspicions contributed to the method of the Soviet-directed political processes following the coup. The purges in other satellites were a preparation for uncovering a suspected "center of imperialist conspiracy" in Czechoslovakia, which was the last Warsaw Pact state to undergo the processes, he wrote.

Such misgivings directly contributed to the scale and severity of local political purges, which saw hundreds of executions as well as thousands of arrests and brutal interrogation techniques that Hanzlík describes as "worse than those employed by the Gestapo."

Death of a statesman

The accompanying political pressure had a profound impact on President Gottwald, who between his 1948 seizure of power as a pragmatic, energetic politician to his death in 1953 deteriorated into a fear-stricken Soviet puppet.

According to Hanzlík, Stalin encumbered Gottwald even before the 1948 coup, instructing him to prevent the adoption of the Marshall Plan and invite Soviet troops while overthrowing the democratic regime. The subsequent 1952 execution of Slánský, Gottwald's right-hand man, further exacerbated his mortal fear of Stalin, Hanzlík said.

As the political purges he instigated on Stalin's bidding spiraled out of his control, Gottwald - already a heavy drinker - became a rampant alcoholic. "Gottwald would try to resist, but Čepička brought a bottle of cognac in his briefcase, or a bottle of vodka, got him drunk and then he would sign anything," Fierlinger wrote in his report.

Paradoxically, Gottwald's 1953 death - the result of an aneurysm linked to alcoholism and syphilis - followed Stalin's by only five days.

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at
features@praguepost.com