Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The leading victims of Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia had all been intellectuals, usually of middle-class origin, many of them Jews. Other classes of Czechoslovak society had not suffered as much. Upward social mobility for workers—or, more precisely, downward social mobility for everyone else—was a distinguishing feature of the 1950s in the Czech and Slovak lands. The percentage of working-class children in non-vocational higher education in Czechoslovakia rose from under 10 percent in 1938 to 31 percent by 1956, nearly 40 percent in 1963. Income distribution in Czechoslovakia by the early Sixties was the most egalitarian in Soviet Europe. The Communist leadership had thus indeed advanced Czechoslovakia to ‘full Socialism’, as the new Constitution of 1960 proclaimed. However, this achievement had been accomplished at the price of a level of stagnation that was unacceptable even by Soviet standards.