I just saw Anthropoid, and it talks a lot about "the Czech government-in-exile, based in London". I assume that, because the government in exile was a democratically elected regime, that they did not return to Czechoslovakia post-war to form the puppet regime installed by the USSR.
Did they continue governing in exile from the UK throughout the Cold War? If so, did it lead to a similar situation with the PRC/RoC wherein certain countries recognized the government in exile as the legitimate government of Czechoslovakia, even though they no longer controlled any Czech territory? Did representatives of that wartime government return to Czechoslovakia after the Cold War ended?
For that matter, what happened to the other governments that fled to Allied territory and later lost control of their home countries to the USSR, such as Poland?
The relationship between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union was more complicated than popular memory holds, at least until 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to put a stop to the Communist-led reform movement now known as the “Prague Spring.” Czechoslovakia acted as a puppet state for the Soviet Union, no doubt, but the Soviet Union did not directly dictate domestic policy in any of its client states, and even less so Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Second World War in comparison to Czechoslovakia’s neighbors Poland, Hungary, and East Germany (the first of which was too strategically important, and the second having been an ally of Germany in the invasion of the Soviet Union). Stalin actually worked with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to establish a pro-Soviet transitional government at the end of the war. Edward Benes, the president of the government-in-exile, remained president of the Soviet Union, and the staunchly pro-Western foreign minister Jan Masaryk remained foreign minister—a position he gained in 1940 because he was the son of the then-deceased Thomas Masaryk, the Czechoslovak founding father. Stalin made sure that this government was pro-Soviet in part by negotiating with Benes prior to liberation a deal in which all right-wing parties would be barred from participating in Czechoslovak politics after the war, but Stalin and the Communists remained immensely popular in Czechoslovakia even without this dictate. Czechoslovaks, and especially the Czechs of Prague, perceived the Munich Agreement which had essentially partitioned Czechoslovakia prior to the war, as a Western betrayal, and the Soviet Union, which had opposed the agreement and later defeated the Germany armies and liberated Prague, as a “beacon of hope” for Czechoslovakia’s future. Indeed, in the first elections after the war (which, again, barred right-wing participation), the Communist Party won 38% of the vote nationally (primarily led by voters around Prague), allowing the Communist Clement Gottwald to form a government comprised of five parties, with Slovakia’s Democratic Party (which won 14% of the national vote) representing the only true challenge to Czechoslovakia’s alliance with the Soviet Union.
That’s right—in 1946, Czechoslovakia voted the Communists into power in a free and fair postwar election. Benes remained president, and Jan Masaryk remained foreign minister, but the Communists obtained most of the other important ministerships (notably the prime minister and the minister of the interior) through democratic means. It’s at this point that Czechoslovak history turns from its pro-Soviet democratic postwar history into the Soviet-dominated history that we are more familiar with. Gottwald used his control over the government (and specifically the ministry of the interior) to marginalize his political opponents. The Communists began replacing public servants with other Communists and used their control over the police to raid the offices of the Slovak Democratic Party and to arrest some of its members. When the non-Communist ministers resigned in protest in February of 1948, Gottwald declared complete control over the government, and the aging Benes acquiesced to this seizure of power—something that the resigning ministers had not thought would happen. Gottwald thus ushered in the era of Soviet-dominated politics, but only because he was himself a faithful servant of Stalin’s (note that Jan Masaryk died during this coup, supposedly by jumping out of a window--many Czechs and Slovaks believed that he had been murdered). Twenty years later, a group of Czechoslovak Communists tested the limits of the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the Prague Spring, which began on a promising note (the Soviets even supported the Czechoslovak Communists initially) but ended in a Soviet invasion that made clear the limits of that sovereignty.
The details of this period can be found in Bradley Abrams The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communist (The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers , 2005).
Edit: I think it's important to point out (which I didn't do) that the Soviet Union refused to recognize the Polish government-in-exile, and that the other Allied powers reluctantly agreed to this demand.