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Under Dr. Benes is a coalition Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Zdenek Fierlinger, ex-Minister to Washington, ex-Ambassador to Moscow, an ardent Russophile and Social Democratic leader. The Communists, who had thrived in the wartime underground, hold just the posts that Communists want: Interior (police), Information, Education, and a Deputy Prime Ministership. They have all the standard machinery of Communist infiltration and inner domination. But though the apparatus is there, Czechoslovakia is not yet a police state. Any Czechs who care to do so are free to express their fears that it might become one.
The main facts of the Benes revolution:
Foreign Policy. The provisional government has reaffirmed the Czechoslovak-Russian pact of 1943 as the "unwavering basis" of the nation's "leading line of foreign policy," with friendly but secondary orientation toward the western democracies. So far, Russia has extracted one ounce of flesh—the border province of Ruthenia. Otherwise Moscow's public participation in Czech affairs has been largely confined to such events as Foreign Commissar Molotov's and Vice Commissar Vishinsky's joint appearance with Benes, Fierlinger et al. on the Moscow radio. Says Dr. Benes:
"Our alliance with the Soviet Union is quite natural. . . . It does not mean that we have cut ourselves off from the democracies of western Europe. . . . We have simply adapted ourselves to the developments of the war. . . ."
But a summer of Red Army occupation had brought disillusionment and uneasiness. Russian soldiers were not the best ambassadors for Russia. Some troopers acted like rustic louts—Stalin is said to have apologized to Benes.
A reaction was inevitable. Benes' countrymen tended to see their culture and material progress—the highest of any Slav people—in a new perspective. They looked inward, feeling that they had something to preserve and something to teach their big Slav cousin. Pride and pressure were building a new nationalism.
Minorities. Toward its disloyal minorities the once tolerant Czechoslovak heart has hardened. Dr. Benes and his Government are adamantly determined to rid the state of almost all of its 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Hungarians—a major surgical operation on the nation's body, involving 16% of its prewar population.
Toward the Slovaks (3,000,000), who once chafed under Czech discrimination and who produced the quisling Father Tiso, the Czech big brothers (7,500,000) show a new tenderness. Last August Dr. Benes journeyed to Banska Bystrica in Slovakia, where he pledged a third of the future parliament and a third of the future economic directorate to cheering Slovaks, who numerically rate only a fourth.