Did the communist government of Czechoslovakia ever seek to profit from the betrayal of France and the United Kingdom at the Munich Conference in its Cold War propaganda?

by prole_doorstep
DefenestrationPraha

Ah, finally something for me, a Czech born in Communist Czechoslovakia.

Munich Conference is commonly described as Munich Betrayal here, and Communist version of history definitely put the cowardly and treacherous behavior of Western capitalists powers into contrast with our true friend, the Soviet Union, which at that time declared its readiness to come to our aid through then-Foreign Minister Litvinov.

Of course, such small details such as dismemberment of Poland by Nazi Germany and the USSR, Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, occupation of Baltic States by Stalin, deportations of Lithuanians to Siberia or the Winter War of USSR against Finland were either downplayed, or interpreted in strictly Soviet tradition: e.g. Finland (3 million people and badly equipped army) decided to attack Soviet Union (140 million people and a huge army) on German orders etc.

nelliemcnervous

As was already mentioned, and as you might suspect, the "Munich betrayal" strongly affected how both the Czechoslovak public and Czechoslovak politicians understood the West after World War II, and the Czechoslovak Communist Party used this to their advantage. According to the Communists, Czechoslovakia had been betrayed at Munich by both its unreliable Western allies and its bourgeois political and economic elite. Had the Czechoslovak government chosen not to back down, they said, the Soviet Union would have supported them, but Czechoslovak leaders preferred to sacrifice their country's integrity to support their political power. Later, the argument developed further: the "Western imperialists" planned to use Nazi Germany as a "striking fist" against the USSR, but the Nazis were unprepared for war in 1938. So Britain and France sacrificed Czechoslovakia not to save themselves from the Nazis, but to save the Nazis from the Soviets.

(An aside: In 1935, the USSR and Czechoslovakia signed an agreement where the Soviets committed to support the Czechoslovaks in the event of an attack from Germany as long as the French would also do so. Of course the French didn't. The Soviets did express support for Czechoslovakia during the Sudetenland crisis but they weren't prepared to intervene militarily. I'm not sure how this would have worked, in any case, since the USSR and Czechoslovakia didn't share a border at the time. The Soviets would have had to go through either Poland or Romania.)

This interpretation of Munich legitimized both the postwar alliance with the Soviet Union as well as a the radical changes in Czechoslovakia's political and economic system after liberation -- especially the nationalization of large enterprises and restrictions on political competition. These radical reforms were something that all the parties in the National Front government signed on for, not simply the Communists. But this particular understanding of Munich was something the Communists originated, and it's something that continued to feature in Communist propaganda after the 1948 coup. In a 1950 show trial, the non-Communist politician Milada Horáková was accused of collaborating with anti-Communist emigrants who were conspiring with Western agents to "prepare a new Munich" that would return them to power in Czechoslovakia.

But I'm not sure that this really answers your question, though. It seems like you're asking whether Czechoslovak propaganda during the Cold War period harped on the Munich Agreement to stir up anti-Western sentiments. My answer to that question would be, not exactly, at least not during the early years of the Communist regime. Official publications do talk about Munich a lot, and obviously they don't paint the British or French governments in a favorable light at all, but the lesson they draw from it is more complex than simply "Western countries are bad." Rather, it's that Czechoslovaks can only count on the Soviet Union to protect them, and that they must be awake and alert (this is the clichéd phrase) for reactionary forces that will sell the country out for their own personal gain.

I'm not as comfortable speaking about how Munich would have been used during the later part of the Cold War, since I don't study this period and there were significant shifts in Communist rhetoric. But looking at some articles in Rudé právo (the "official organ of the Czechoslovak Communist Party") suggests that the "internal enemies" theme became somewhat less prominent and the "Western imperialists" one more so, which is not surprising. Even less surprising is that JFK's father, who supported the Munich agreement as ambassador to Britain, keeps coming up.