Programmatic Principles of the Economic and Social Policy in the Czechoslovak Resistance Movement during the Second World War

The antifascist movement in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War paid considerable attention to conceptualizing economic and social policy after the liberation of the country. Between 1939 and 1945 the resistance movement consisted of several mainstreams. Czechoslovak political representation abroad was concentrated partly around President Edvard Beneš and the internationally accredited government-in-exile in London and partly around the foreign leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in Moscow. In the home country the resistance movement developed differently in the Czech Lands and in Slovakia. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia various groups participated in resistance activities and gradually under the mounting infl uence of the Communist Party they radicalized and drew nearer to it. In the beginning the antifascist resistance in Slovakia was on a more modest scale. However, in December 1943 contacts between the mainstreams - Communist and bourgeois-democratic groups- led to the creation of the clandestine Slovak National Council. The climax of the resistance movement was the Slovak National Uprising between August and October 1944 and the Prague Rising in the last days of the Second World War. The article traces the major ideas and views of the separate components of the resistance movement and their increasing radicalization in the course of the War. Features common to their refl ections and programmes arose from the experiences of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, from antifascist positions, from the shifting world power relations during the war and from the anticipation of far-reaching social changes in renascent Czechoslovakia. A specifi c feature of the Slovak resistance movement was the realization of certain of its programmatic principles during the Slovak National Uprising and in the first months of 1945. The common position of the different resistance groups became the basis of the programme of the fi rst government on the liberated territory - the Košice Government Programme - which was approved at the beginning of April 1945.