Prelude to the Establishment of Communism in Slovakia

Abstract

The unified Czechoslovak state broke apart in early 1939 after German troops occupied the Czech lands and enabled Slovakia to declare itself an independent country. From that point until April 1945, as events in Slovakia and the Czech lands proceeded along very different tracks, the Slovak and Czechoslovak communist parties often had tense relations. The six years of separation of the two erstwhile components of Czechoslovakia, and the postwar options available to Slovakia, were gradually eroded by the efforts of the exiled Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, to forge an extremely close relationship with the Soviet Union. The spring of 1945 marked a turning point in this process, paving the way for the establishment of centralized communist rule in the whole of Czechoslovakia in February 1948.