Czechoslovakia represents the one exception among the countries sovietized after the war, as it was the only country in which the Communist Party enjoyed, at first, a certain legitimacy. This legitimacy would later be lost, in the 1950s, and was regained during the reformist period of Alexander Dubcek. However, after the Prague Spring was crushed under the Soviet tanks, the new communist leadership would return to a closed, ultra conservative regime that was unable to change until the very end. Czechoslovakia was known in the interwar period as the most democratic country in Central-Eastern Europe. It was also the only country in which the Communist Party wasn’t banned; moreover, this party was considered important, respectable and, most importantly, domestic (as opposed to a simple extension of the CPSU). The Czechoslovak communists were regular participants in the democratic rule and they always received at least 10% of votes during elections. The Communist Party was banned only in 1938, during the new Nazi administration, but managed to keep its honest political image during the war. Historian J. F. Brown has argued that the party’s postwar political position was determined by several factors: the Nazi occupation; the disenchantment with the West, caused by the Munich Agreement (in which the soviets were not directly involved, although Stalin accepted the decision made ); the existence of a strong working class in Czechoslovakia, as well as a longstanding intellectual leftist tradition; the postwar prestige of the Soviet Union, untarnished by the brutality of Red Army which other countries faced; and, last but not least, the existence of a pan-Slavic ideology among the Czechs and Slovaks and the lack of the Russophobia seen, for example, in Romania or Poland. The communists’ presence in the country’s postwar government was secured as early as 1943, when Edvard