After a successful performance during the 1946 parliamentary election, party leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister of a coalition government at the behest of President Edvard Beneš.

This, along with the electoral failures of the French and Italian communist parties, prompted Joseph Stalin to harden his approach and order Gottwald to seize power.

The event alarmed Western countries and helped spur quick adoption of the Marshall Plan, the creation of a state in West Germany, paramilitary measures to keep communists out of power in France, Greece and especially Italy, and steps toward mutual security that would, in little over a year, result in the establishment of NATO and the definitive drawing of the Iron Curtain until the Revolutions of 1989.

President Edvard Beneš, not himself a Communist but very amenable to cooperation with the Soviets, and who hoped for restraint by the Allied powers, thus invited Gottwald to be prime minister.

The activities of the police—headed by Interior Minister Václav Nosek, a Communist—were acutely offensive to many citizens; farmers objected to talk of collectivization, and some workers were angry at Communist demands that they increase output without being given higher wages.

[13] Matters came to a head in February 1948, when Nosek illegally extended his powers by attempting to purge remaining non-Communist elements in the National Police Force.

Soviet deputy foreign minister Valerian Zorin, who had been his country's ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1947, returned to Prague to help with the final arrangements for the coup.

[15] The army, under the direction of Defence Minister Ludvík Svoboda, who was formally non-partisan but had facilitated Communist infiltration into the officer corps, was confined to barracks and did not interfere.

[15][16] Communist "Action Committees" and trade union militias were quickly set up, armed, and sent into the streets, as well as being prepared to carry through a purge of anti-Communists.

[21] The National Assembly, freely elected two years earlier, quickly fell into line and gave Gottwald's revamped government a vote of confidence in March.

[19][27] Beneš died in September, bringing a symbolic close to the sequence of events, and was buried before an enormous and silent throng come to mourn the passing of a popular leader and of the democracy he had come to represent.

For the second time in a decade, Western eyes saw Czechoslovak independence and democracy snuffed out by a foreign totalitarian dictatorship intent on dominating the small country (though unlike in 1938–39, the KSČ did most of the "dirty work").

[30] Until early 1948, Western and Soviet representatives had communicated in regular meetings at the foreign minister level; the Czechoslovak coup constituted a final rupture in relations between the two superpowers, with the West now signaling its determination to commit itself to collective self-defence.

[19] Until the Czech coup, the emphasis in Washington had been on economic containment of Communism, primarily through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and a heavy reliance on atomic power as a shield to support it.

When taking into account Defense Department complaints that the U.S. atomic arsenal and the air power to use it were starkly inadequate, it became clear that the U.S. lacked a credible military deterrent in Europe.

Truman responded to the crisis with a grim nationwide radio address on 17 March calling for a renewal of selective service, which had been allowed to lapse the previous year.

[34] The coup and the Berlin Blockade that June made clear that constant reassurance was needed to bind the Europeans to the U.S. system;[35] hence, the remobilization of U.S. armed forces began.

On 5 March, General Lucius D. Clay sent an alarming telegram from Berlin that advised of its likelihood: "Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness".

[36] In fact, Clay's warning had more to do with a request by Army director of intelligence Lt. Gen. Stephen Chamberlain for material that would persuade Congress to spend more on military readiness than with any hard evidence of Soviet intent to launch a war in Europe.

He later wrote that the Prague coup and the Berlin Blockade were "defensive reactions" to the Marshall Plan's initial successes and to the Western decision to press for an independent West German state.

This view of the event sees Truman's reaction as him seizing on a necessary crisis to sell the Marshall Plan and the rearmament programme the Pentagon had long been pushing.

[39] Marshall's own reaction was that "in so far as international affairs are concerned, a seizure of power by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia would not materially alter...the situation which has existed in the last three years".

[40] On 2 March, CIA director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter had also written to Truman that "the timing of the coup in Czechoslovakia was forced upon the Kremlin when the non-Communists took action endangering Communist control of the police.

In the hysteria and foreboding that gripped Western circles following the Czech coup, it was concluded that similar tactics could be employed in Italy, whose citizens might not even have a chance to vote.

[42] Bevin was especially alarmed by the ability of the PCI, through the use of its dominant position in the trade union movement, to organise industrial disturbances not only to sabotage the success of the Marshall Plan, but also to subvert the Italian government through factory committees of action as in Czechoslovakia.

[42] This was observed when Communist and socialist leaders in Italy defended the Czech coup as a victory for democracy, rationalizing that the violation of civil rights was a necessary and just response to a reactionary threat posed by Western imperialist (i.e., American) interests; such discourse probably damaged the Front's credibility and undercut its promises of moderation.

[46] Stalin, satisfied that America had not moved militarily after the Czech coup and unwilling to provoke war, respected the result, considering Italy a Western country.

At the same time, the coup had forced the hand of PCF leader Maurice Thorez, whose public remarks suggested that in the wake of a Soviet invasion, he would support the Red Army.

[48] Along with passage of the Marshall Plan, the other far-reaching implication of the Czech coup for U.S. foreign policy was to heed Bevin's call for a Western defence association.

[49] On 26 February, Bevin again reiterated that the best way to prevent another Czechoslovakia was to evolve a joint Western military strategy, and this time he got a more receptive hearing, especially considering American anxiety over Italy.