“We, the working people of Czechoslovakia, solemnly declare: The social establishment, for which whole generations of our workers and other workers fought and which had been a model since the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, has become a reality in our country under the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Socialism has won in our homeland! ”
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Thus begins the Constitutional Act of 11 July 1960 (external reference here). On that day, members of the National Assembly approved the socialist constitution, the new name of the state – the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) and a new coat of arms. The one with the five-pointed star: “The coat of arms of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic consists of a red shield in the shape of a Hussite pavilion with a five-pointed star at the top, with a white two-tailed lion carrying a red label with a blue silhouette of Krivan and a gold fire on its chest.”
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Take a look at period photographs that commemorate this event.
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Photo of July 11, 1960: Members of the National Assembly vote to adopt a new constitution.
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The President of the Republic and the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Antonín Novotný signs the new constitution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Behind him on the right is Prime Minister Viliam Široký, originally a railway worker from Slovakia, who made a career as an aide to Klement Gottwald. Historians rank him among the main architects of Bolshevik terror in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, and purges of democratic opponents of the Communist Party are attributed to him. The sixth from left is Zdeněk Fierlinger, post-war prime minister and former ambassador to the Soviet Union. Apparently since the 1930s he was an agent of the Soviet secret service NKVD. In Czechoslovak history, he occupies the position of the one who helped destroy social democracy. In the 1950s, he was put in charge of the church.
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Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. This name lasted the country not only until the end of the communist regime, but for a few months longer. It was not changed until the adoption of the new constitutional law of March 1990 to the Czechoslovak Federal Republic. (The photo comes from the state border near Náchod.)
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Socialism in the title was a cosmetic confirmation of the political development that “Victorious February” brought in 1948. In the picture on May 31, 1961, the socialist statesmen were welcomed, as many remember. Time caption: “At our border at the railway station in Čierná nad Tisou, they welcomed the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who visited the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic on his way from Vienna. After that he went to Bratislava. The picture shows the first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Nikita Seregjevič Khrushchev (left) and the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the president of the Czechoslovak Republic Antonín Novotný during a kiss. “
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