Klement Gottwald is one of the first communist politicians in Czechoslovakia. He was the leader of the party, and the prime minister, and the president of this country. For some time there was even a cult of Gottwald, and his body was initially embalmed and became the subject of public viewing in the mausoleum. Cities and streets were named after him not only in his homeland, but also in other countries. But in the sixties of the twentieth century, they began to call him the Czechoslovak Stalin. Let's take a look at the biography of this politician.
Youth and first steps as a leader
Klement Gottwald was born in 1896 in the Austro-Hungarian city of Wischau (now it is in the Czech Republic and is called Dedice). He grew up in the family of a peasant woman who never married. In his youth, the future politician worked as a mahogany master, which he learned in Vienna. In 1912 he joined the Social Democratic Party. He was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, fought on the eastern front. In 1921 he became one of the co-founders of the Communistparty and helped publish its newspaper in Bratislava.
Takeoff
The career of the future President of Czechoslovakia begins to go up rapidly from the mid-twenties of the twentieth century. In 1925 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Party, and in 1929 he became General Secretary. In the same year, Gottwald was delegated to the National Assembly of Czechoslovakia as a deputy. In 1935, he became secretary of the Comintern and left this post only after the dissolution of the latter in 1943. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, Klement Gottwald leaves for the Soviet Union, where he spends the next seven years in de facto exile. From there, he begins to lead the communist resistance in Czechoslovakia.
Politician Klement Gottwald: biography of the party leader
In March 1945, Eduard Beneš, the country's pre-war president and head of the government-in-exile in London since 1941, agreed to form the National Front with the communists. Gottwald in this deal got the post of Deputy Prime Minister of the country. As for party affairs, he gave the post of General Secretary to Rudolf Slansky, and he himself took the new position of Chairman.
In the 1946 elections, he led his political force into parliament with thirty-eight percent of the vote. This was the best result of the communists in the history of Czechoslovakia. But by the summer of 1947, the popularity of this party began to decline rapidly, and many observers believed that Gottwald would lose hisposition. At this time, Italy and France began to oust the communists from the coalition governments, and Joseph Stalin advised Gottwald to do everything so that only one force remained in power. All this time, the politician pretended to work in the government. In fact, he was plotting. The game was over in February 1948, when the Cabinet of Ministers ordered Interior Minister Vaslav Nosek to stop accepting only communists into the power structures. He refused with the support of Gottwald. Then 12 government ministers resigned. Gottwald, under the threat of a general strike, took the Communists in their place. Benes tried to resist, but under the threat of a Soviet invasion, he surrendered. From that moment on, Klement Gottwald became the most powerful person in Czechoslovakia.
The pinnacle of power
On May 9, 1948, the country's National Assembly adopted a new Constitution. It was so pro-communist that Beneš refused to sign it. In June he resigned, and a few days later Gottwald was elected president. At first, the new leader of the country tried to pursue a quasi-independent policy, but after a meeting with Stalin, he abruptly changed course. Klement Gottwald, whose photo began to be printed on the front pages of all newspapers in Czechoslovakia, in a short time nationalized the entire industry of the country and collectivized all agriculture. There was strong resistance to such changes in the government. Then Gottwald begins to purge. First, he expels from the authorities and arrests everyone who did not belong to the communists,and then his fellow party members, who did not agree with him. The victims of these purges were Rudolf Slansky and Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis (shot in 1952), as well as hundreds of other people who were executed or thrown into prison. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetfulness, recounts an incident typical of such a Stalinist-type leader as the politician Klement Gottwald. A photo of him dated February 21, 1948 shows the country's president standing next to Vlado Clementis. When charges of treason were brought against the latter two years later, the image of the former minister was destroyed by state propaganda.
Death. Czechoslovakia after Gottwald
For several years, the politician suffered from heart disease. A couple of days after attending Stalin's funeral in 1953, he became ill. He died on March 14, 1956, at the age of fifty-six. His embalmed body was exhibited in the mausoleum, and a cult of his personality began in the country. But six years later he was cremated and reburied in a closed sarcophagus. It is said that the corpse began to decompose because scientists miscalculated the composition of the embalming. And after the end of the communist era in the country, his ashes, along with the remains of twenty other party leaders, were reburied in a common grave at the Olšany cemetery in Prague. At the end of the 1980s, there was an attempt to print his portrait on Czech banknotes, but this was perceived so negatively that all these banknotes were withdrawn from use.
