Klement Gottwald

Klement Gottwald became general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1929 and spent nearly two decades building the apparatus that would take power. After the Munich Agreement collapsed democratic Czechoslovakia, the right-wing Second Republic banned his party and he fled to the Soviet Union in November 1938. In 1943 he brokered an alliance with President Edvard Beneš and the London-based government-in-exile, forming the National Front to unite anti-fascist resistance. He returned as prime minister in July 1946 — the first Communist to hold the office. Four months after his pa…