On This Day: Czechoslovakia becomes communist dictatorship after Benes resigns

JUNE 7, 1948: Czechoslovakia became the last nation in Europe to officially turn into a communist state after its elected president Edvard Benes resigned on this day in 1948.

The leader of socialists refused to sign the Ninth-of-May Constitution that would transform the country into a Soviet-style authoritarian system.

His resignation came three months after the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which had the biggest membership outside Russia, staged a coup.

It suspended the May elections in which they were expected to lose their status as the biggest grouping in parliament, albeit without an overall majority.

Communist party leader Klement Gottwald, who was encouraged to seize power by Moscow, decided to keep Benes as president if he would agree to acquiesce.

The pre-war leader, who had fled the country when the Nazis invaded, decided to accept the coup as he was fearful of a bloody civil war and Soviet intervention.

The communist party, who had 2.5million members, already largely secured control of the police and army in a process described in a British Pathé newsreel.

The Soviet foreign minister Valentin Zorin was also in Prague at the time of the coup, which bolstered the threat of a Red Army invasion.

But Benes, who was democratically elected in 1946 after serving as wartime leader in exile, could not bear to see his country come under totalitarian rule for a second time.

He was forced to watch as his friend, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, another one of the few formerly democratically elected politicians to keep his job in the new regime, was found dead in mysterious circumstances two weeks after the coup.

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The 61-year-old liberal was either pushed or jumped from a tiny window, which would have been a difficult feat as he was 6ft tall and heavyset.

His body was discovered below his flat at the Foreign Ministry in Prague while wearing only pyjamas.

Masaryk’s death officially recorded as suicide – and the police doctor who certified that the politician had taken his own life was himself found dead a few weeks later.

The new constitution, which declared Czechoslovakia a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, was the final straw and so he resigned.

His health had already been weakened by watching the West sign the 1939 Munich Agreement, which condoned Germany’s invasion in a futile bid to stop war.

Now, with his life’s work ruined again, he was left truly broken man and died aged 64 just three months later - and along with him the memory of democracy.

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Czechoslovakia had also been the region’s most vibrant democracies before World War II, which began six months after Britain and France sacrificed her to the Nazis.

The country was liberated by the Soviet Union in 1945 as it sought a new sphere of influence and a buffer zone between itself and the west.

Yet unlike countries such as Hungary and Poland, where the Red Army handed control to communists, Czechoslovakians were given their own say.

The difference was that the Czechoslovakian wartime government in exile – unlike that of neighbouring Poland – was sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

It also had a big communist party of its own.

But the mighty Red Army, which showed its power after invading Hungary in 1956 to stop democratic changes taking place, always lay in the shadows.

And Soviet troops would eventually invade Czechoslovakia after local communists defied the Kremlin with liberal reforms during the 1968 Prague Spring.

The country remained a communist state until 1989 Velvet Revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall in neighbouring East Germany.

Czechoslovakia was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia by its new democratic leaders – despite public opposition in 1993.