Alexej Čepička

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Alexej Čepička (1970)

Alexej Čepička (born August 18, 1910 in Kroměříž , † September 30, 1990 in Dobříš ) was a Czechoslovak politician . From 1947 to 1956 he held some of the highest offices in government and in the party. He was general , justice and defense minister , member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and son-in-law of Prime Minister Klement Gottwald .

youth

He was born in the family of a postal worker in the Moravian town of Kroměříž. From 1929 he studied law in Prague . In the same year he joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party , where he was involved in the communist student union "Kostufra". In the second half of the 1930s he worked in a law firm in Ostrava . In 1942 he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps until the end of the war .

Career start

After his return to Kroměříž in May 1945, Čepička was a member and soon also chairman of the municipal national committee . In 1946 he entered the Prague Parliament as a communist member of parliament. In December 1947 he was given the post of Minister of Internal Trade . The supply situation was poor: a drought in the summer of 1947, the end of UNRRA aid deliveries, a shortage of raw materials in industry and the associated shortage of goods caused the black market to grow. Čepička focused on the textile market , one of the sectors in which the problems were particularly great. His plan to nationalize textile wholesaling with the help of a ministerial decree, however, initially threatened to fail due to resistance from non-communist ministers. Prime Minister Klement Gottwald set up a commission to reach an agreement. Only after raids against (actual or alleged) black marketeers had won public opinion for him, was Čepička's proposal accepted in February 1948. The textile shelves filled up for a short time. The action cemented the minister's prestige as a successful, uncompromising hardliner.

Minister of Justice

After the February revolution in 1948, Čepička moved to the office of Minister of Justice for two years . He used the time to fundamentally reorganize the judicial system. His inauguration began with personal consequences. Dozens of officials and judges have been fired, and staff loyal to the government have succeeded. Then there were structural changes. Professional judges were replaced by lay judges “from among the people”, and the judicial office as a whole was weakened. The most important organ of the new concept was now the procurator or chief prosecutor. All organs of the administration of justice, particularly the criminal defense attorneys , were given orders by the ministry. Ultimately, a troika under the direction of the minister decided in the form of binding instructions on all judicial matters, right up to the level of the sentence. To legalize the new organizational structure, Čepička drafted a new criminal code , which was passed in October 1949. Law 231/1948 “for the protection of the people's democratic republic” came into force beforehand, regulating issues such as high treason , espionage and sabotage and threatening them with long prison sentences or the death penalty . It became the basis for tens of thousands of judgments and the most important instrument of the Stalinist judiciary in Czechoslovakia.

National front and fight against the churches

During his time as Minister of Justice, Čepička was also general secretary of the “Central Action Committee of the National Front ”. For a few months after the February upheaval, the action committees worked primarily at the local level. They were responsible for the fact that around 250,000 to 280,000 people who were not part of the Communist Party lost their jobs or university places. Another focus of her work was the central supervision of the churches . From October 1949 this competence was transferred to the newly created "Office for Church Affairs", which Čepička took over as chairman. At his instigation, a campaign called “Catholic Action” was launched, which was dedicated to the “fight against the Vatican ” and whose aim was to bring the churches under state control. The Vatican itself had published the decree on the excommunication of communist Catholics in 1949. After an initial wave of arrests, an individual amnesty was granted in 1949 , during which 99 priests willing to cooperate were released. During Čepička's term of office, there was one trial of religious and two other church trials. A planned large show trial of clergymen, however, failed due to the violent death of the planned main defendant Josef Toufar .

Defense Minister

Today's Hotel Crowne Plaza in Prague, built in 1952–54 as Hotel Družba on the orders of Alexej Čepička

On April 25, 1950, Klement Gottwald appointed his minister of justice and, from 1948, his son-in-law Alexej Čepička to the department of national defense . The most important goal of his new task was to redesign the Czechoslovak armed forces based on the Soviet model and to get them ready for combat as quickly as possible. In September 1950, the “Supreme Council of State Defense ” ( Nejvyšší rada obrany státu ) decided to accelerate the expansion of the army, thus laying the official basis for the future work of the ministry. At a meeting in Moscow in January 1951, Stalin personally informed the minister of his opinion that war against the West would break out within the next three to four years.

From then on, the Ministry of Defense operated largely behind closed doors and without discussion within the government. Gottwald and Čepička had brought 280 Soviet officers into the country as advisors. In making its decisions, the ministry could refer to instructions from Moscow. In addition, the rule had become established that matters relating to the army were to be treated as secret. Since the consultation between Stalin and Čepička had taken place after the first five-year plan had been passed, a non-public “parallel plan” was created, which provided for the production of the newly created Czechoslovak military-industrial complex to be increased by 1050% by 1955. According to official figures, the ministry's budget rose from 9.56 billion crowns in 1950 to 41.84 billion crowns in 1953. Unofficial documents suggest that the actual expenditure was more than twice as high. Under Čepička's leadership, the army became a “state within a state”, with an independent communications network, its own forest and land, its own housing department and many prestige objects in the fields of sport, culture, education and leisure. The material living conditions, especially for professional soldiers, improved significantly. The minister himself did not exempt himself from this and increased his salary by 50% in 1952.

In 1951, however, it became apparent that the planned expansion of the Czechoslovak economy could not even begin to be managed. The results presented for 1952 were disastrous. On average, the plan in the armaments industry was only 53% fulfilled. In central areas such as artillery or the air force , the numbers were again significantly lower. However, Stalin had already rejected the minister's request for additional supplies of raw materials from the Soviet Union in 1951. Gottwald and Čepička stuck to the plan, but could not fulfill it.

descent

After the death of Stalin and his father-in-law and most important ally Klement Gottwald in March 1953, Čepička initially remained in office. The gradual decline of his “empire” was initiated by the new foreign and defense policy orientation of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev . On the one hand, it increasingly relied on nuclear weapons , which meant that the almost complete, conventional armament of the Czechoslovak army had become largely superfluous. Khrushchev's policy of peaceful coexistence also soon shrank the Czechoslovak armaments budget.

The first criticism of Čepička's leadership style also came from the Soviet initiative. In 1954 Khrushchev suggested the rehabilitation of Čepička's predecessor Ludvík Svoboda , who had been removed from office in 1950 and arrested at short notice. The Czechoslovak leadership initially refused. The result was a sharp reprimand from the Soviet party leader. Although Čepička was not primarily responsible in this case, the new government, Viliam Široký II , decreed a substantial first cut in his powers during the presidency of Antonín Zápotocký in 1954. But only as a result of the XX. At the 1956 party congress of the CPSU , which initiated de-Stalinization , Čepička was sacrificed and finally lost his ministerial post. Until 1958 he remained a member of the Central Committee of KSČ and worked as the head of the Office for Inventions and Normalization. Since 1959, after being unable to work after a heart attack , he was receiving a disability pension.

When in 1963 one of the four commissions for dealing with the political processes in the 1950s presented its final report, Alexej Čepička was named as one of the main culprits and expelled from the communist party.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži . Paseka, Praha - Litomyšl 2004, ISBN 80-7185-616-9 , pp. 123-124.
  2. ↑ Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži , pp. 124–130.
  3. ↑ Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži , pp. 131–135. The wording of the law is available online as a pdf at totalita.cz .
  4. ↑ Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži , pp. 135–141.
  5. ↑ Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži , pp. 141–158.
  6. ↑ Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži , pp. 158–171.
personal data
SURNAME Čepička, Alexej
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak politician
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Kroměříž
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1990
Place of death Dobříš