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Nationalization. The confiscation of German, Hungarian and collaborationist properties has already put 6,800 enterprises, employing 800,000 workers, under Government management. The nationalization of loyal Czechoslovak industry, banks and insurance companies (with compensation) is proceeding more slowly, encountering more difficulties. Up for Government ownership on the official list are mines, utilities, foundries, armament and chemical plants, pottery, porcelain and glass factories, cement, textile and metal factories. For the present, businesses employing fewer than 500 workers are exempt. The end objective: 70% nationalized, 30% free.
Land Reform. The farms taken from Germans, Hungarians and collaborationists are being redistributed among landless Czechs and Slovaks. The last big estates (not many, since prewar Czechoslovakia carried out an extensive land reform) are vanishing. Agriculture is being rationalized—but not through the Soviet system of collectivization. The kolkhoz (collective farms), Communists agree, would be anathema to Czechoslovakia's peasant landowners. Instead, the Government is promoting farmers' cooperatives on a scale surpassing that of prewar days, when they counted 2,000,000 members.
The Middle Way. Czechoslovakia's political arena is limited to four parties: 1) the Communists, led by stout, pipe-smoking Deputy Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, 48, an exile in Moscow between 1939 and 1945; 2) the Social Democrats, led by mousy, opportunistic Prime Minister Fierlinger, 54; 3) the Socialists, led by Dr. Benes; and 4) the People's (Catholic) Party, led by portly, colorful, progressive Monsignor Jan Sramek, 75, ex-Prime Minister and now Deputy Prime Minister.
So far the Czechoslovak Communists, at best temporary friends of middleway revolution, have made no move to seize power or to upset the balance envisioned by Dr. Benes. But they hold solid posts in all the key strata of the nation's life—in the Government, army, trade unions, cooperatives, nationalized industry. They are still authoritarians. They flank Masaryk's portrait with Lenin and Stalin.
Ebullient Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, 59, son of the great Thomas Masaryk, is a nonpartisan in domestic politics but a western democrat in outlook. Unassuming Dr. Petr Zenkl, 61, Lord Mayor of Prague, old crony of Dr. Benes, is one of the ablest and most popular of Socialist leaders. Shrewd Antonin Zapotocki, Communist boss of the powerful, well-disciplined central trade unions council (U.R.O.), is in the thick of the nationalization program. Workers committees chosen by the U.R.O. will help the Government to manage confiscated factories, allocate manpower, speed up production.
Prime Minister Fierlinger's Russophilism pulls the Social Democrats toward the Communists. But Dr. Benes has a stout friend in Monsignor Sramek, whose reports presumably account for the Vatican's belief that predominantly Catholic (74%) Czechoslovakia may indeed find its middle way.