“The Best Representatives of the Liberated People”: Local Legacies of Resistance in Postwar Czechoslovakia

In 1945, Czechoslovakia’s political leaders sought to reestablish a radical new political system on the legacy of national resistance to fascism and foreign domination. They looked to members of the resistance to establish this new order at the local level. In Moravian Wallachia, located in the easternmost part of the contemporary Czech Republic, former partisans played an especially important role in postwar political life. This poor, rural region became a center of armed struggle against Nazi occupation during the final year of the Second World War. Members of multiple overlapping underground networks worked together with little regard for politics or nationality, relying on local farmers to survive under a repressive occupying regime. After liberation, partisans developed a vision of postwar justice rooted in their experiences of collective suffering and resistance. Just as the people of Wallachia were united during wartime, they declared, so should they be united in building a new republic that would afford prosperity and security to their peripheral region. Although this political ethos led many Wallachian partisans to join the Czechoslovak Communist Party and support its seizure of power in 1948, others found themselves targeted for repression as class enemies or political opponents. Some partisans came to see the consolidation of Communist dictatorship as a betrayal of their resistance. Communist leaders, they believed, sought to undermine the partisans’ unity and usurp their rightful claim to power. Although the antifascist partisan movement later became a symbolic pillar of the Communist regime, partisans’ independent power posed a challenge to one-party rule during the regime’s earliest years. By examining the postwar lives of former resisters in Moravian Wallachia, this paper reveals both how occupation, resistance, and victory shaped Czechoslovak postwar politics, and how local interpretations of these experiences could differ dramatically from those presented in official narratives.