Klement Gottwald (23 November 1896 – 14 March 1953) was Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia from 2 July 1946 to 15 June 1948, succeeding Zdenek Fierlinger and preceding Antoni Zapotocky, and President of Czechoslovakia from 14 June 1948 to 14 March 1953, succeeding Edvard Benes and preceding Zapotocky.
Biography[]
Klement Gottwald was born in Dedice, Moravia, Austria-Hungary in 1896, and he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. He became a founding member of the Communist Party of Czechloslovakia in 1921, and he was a proponent of its radical wing. Gottwald joined the party's Central Committee in 1925 and became its General Secretary in 1929. He made the party more amenable to Joseph Stalin, but lost a lot of popular support for the party as a result. He spent World War II in Moscow, and returned in 1945 to form a national front government, whose leader he became in 1946. From an initially dominant position, however, support for the communists was eroded by Soviet refusal to allow Czechoslovak acceptance of Marshall aid. Gottwald thus led a coup in February 1948, which firmly entrenched communist power. He lacked the backbone to stand up to Stalin, and agreed to wide-scale purges culminating in the Slanski trial, which vastly increased Soviet control over the Communist Party. Gottwald died in office in 1953.