Komunistická strana Slovenska (1939)

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The Komunistická strana Slovenska , or KSS for short , German Communist Party of Slovakia , was an independent Slovak communist party that existed from 1939 to 1948.

backgrounds

Until 1939, the Slovak communists were only organized as a wing or faction within the all-Czechoslovak communist party Komunistická strana Československa (KSČ). After the establishment of the Slovak Republic , which was dependent on the Third Reich , the Slovak part of KSČ separated and in March 1939 founded its own, independent Komunistická strana Slovenska. At that time, the party newspaper Pravda was founded. The party had its own congresses, bodies such as the Central Committee and its own leadership. Party personalities included Gustáv Husák , Ladislav Novomeský , Viliam Široký , Karol Šmidke and others.

Despite the ban, the party remained illegally active in what was then fascist-clerical Slovakia, and even the party leadership was active there until 1943 and beyond.

The last years of the war

Komunistická strana Slovenska was represented in the Slovak National Council , an organ of foreign Slovaks. With some members (like Karol Šmidke, Gustáv Husák) also on its board, and they took part in the Slovak national uprising .

At the end of 1944, in the illegal leadership of the KSS, the idea of ​​a merger of the Communist Party with the Social Democrats arose, which at that time had not yet received approval from the Communist leadership in Moscow. At a congress on September 17, 1944, however, the union came about, in the course of which fewer than 20,000 Social Democrats (of a total of about 37,000 of the pre-war class) joined the Communist Party (they made up only a third of the delegates). In the new party leadership there was a ratio of four Communist Party functionaries to just one Social Democrat; in the party apparatus the imbalance was even greater.

Post-war successes

The KSS participated in the National Front of Czechs and Slovaks and was admitted as such to the elections in 1946 and 1948:

  • Parliamentary election in 1946 , in which she received 6.89% of the vote (in Slovakia, contrary to expectations, only 30.4%); she won 21 seats (out of 300) in the National Assembly.
  • Parliamentary elections in 1948, in which they did better than 1946 with 18% overall (and 76.1% in Slovakia); she won 54 seats (out of 300) in the National Assembly

The KSS participated in the first post-war governments of Czechoslovakia:

This party initially retained its independence even after the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, which strengthened the influence of the communists, for example in the National Front. It was only after the communist takeover of power (in February 1948) that it was subordinated to the KSČ as a "regional organization of the KSČ in Slovakia". The historian Karel Kaplan sees this as the cause of the “asymmetrical” model of the Czechoslovak Communist Party that lasted until 1989. While the Slovak party continued to exist after 1948 as a part of the all-Czechoslovak KSČ, there was never a separate organization for the Czech part of the country (Bohemia and Moravia).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Karel Kaplan : The fateful alliance. Infiltration, conformity and annihilation of the Czechoslovak Social Democracy 1944–1954. Pol-Verlag, Wuppertal 1984, ISBN 3-9800905-0-7 , Chapters I / 2 and I / 3, p. 36ff.
  2. ↑ a b Výsledky voleb v Československu , online at: www.czso.cz (Czech Stat. Office) (PDF; 1.1 MB), Czech, accessed on December 2, 2010

See also