Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed by Heimann Mary

Author:Heimann, Mary [Heimann, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300141474
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, 1960–68

On 9 April 1960, the regime took the precaution of readjusting the regional boundaries of the state in such a way as to prevent any resurgence of Slovak ‘bourgeois’ nationalism and ensure a firm centralization of the state. This came in the shape of a new law that divided the country into ten regions: seven in the Bohemian Crown Lands and three in Slovakia (the western, central and eastern Slovak regions). On 5–7 July, a state-wide congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced that socialism had been victorious in Czechoslovakia, and discussed a draft of a new constitution to acknowledge the fact. Article 1 of the constitution adopted on 11 July 1960 declared the ‘unitary state of two fraternal nations possessing equal rights, the Czechs and the Slovaks’, to be a ‘socialist state founded on the firm alliance of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia, with the working class at its head’, and to be ‘part of the world socialist system’.105 Although the Slovak National Council was preserved, it was specifically restricted to working ‘under the direction of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’ to ensure ‘a uniform execution of state power and administration’ together with ‘the general development of the economy and culture in Slovakia’.106 The body that was supposed to administer state policies in Slovakia, the Board of Commissioners, was abolished, as were several Slovak branches of central institutions.

Article 4 of the constitution made explicit that ‘the guiding force in society and in the state is the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’, which was defined as ‘a voluntary militant alliance of the most active and most politically conscious citizens from the ranks of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia’.107 The ‘entire national economy’ was to be ‘directed by the state plan for the development of the national economy’, a plan that was ‘usually to be worked out for a period of five years’ and, together with the annual state budget, promulgated by law.108 The place of ideology was assured in Article 16, which stated that the ‘entire cultural policy of Czechoslovakia, the development of all forms of education, schooling and instruction’ were to be ‘directed in the spirit of the scientific world outlook, Marxism-Leninism, and closely linked to the work of the people’. The state and the ‘people's organisations’ were further instructed ‘systematically [to] endeavour to free the minds of the people from the surviving influences of a society based on exploitation’.109 As part of the constitution's stated aim of securing ‘the full development of socialist society’ and creating ‘the conditions for the gradual transition to communism’, particular attention was to be paid to ‘eliminating the substantial differences between physical and mental labour and between town and country’.110 In the latter aim, the ‘fraternal co-operation between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other countries of the world socialist system’ was singled out for attention, and promises were made to ‘systematically develop and strengthen this co-operation, which is based on mutual assistance and the international socialist division of labour’.

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