Suchergebnisse

The year of 1948 was one of the most critical ones of the postwar period. The presence of the Cold War could no longer be denied. Berlin was under Soviet blockade; Yugoslavia had broken with the Cominform; in elections in Italy it was feared that the Italian Communist party would be widely successful; France was in the grip of Communist-inspired workers' strikes; Mao Tse-Tung was triumphing in China. Above all, Czechoslovakia, a country which had enjoyed real democracy from its birth in 1918, until the tragic Munich Agreement in 1938, where its people treasured political and personal freedom above everything else, and at the same time entertained the friendliest possible feelings towards the Russians, lost its democracy and became a Soviet satellite with the connivance of Moscow. Dr. Eduard Beneš, who had returned to his country, via Moscow, as President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and who had been promised by Stalin and Molotov, on several occasions, that they would not interfere with the internal affairs of his country, lost his power to Gottwald and his communist group while Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Zorin, who "happened" to be in Prague at the critical moment on a trade mission, supervised the transfer of power to the new masters of Czechoslovakia.