Abstract
After February 1948, the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party through Coup of Prague implemented the Stalinist model of political organization, social model and economic development which contrasted profundly with the multiparty system which had featured Czechoslovakia in the First Republic period embodied by Masaryk who was the President from 1918 to 1935. The death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953 coincided with the one of Stalin the same year, whereas Antonin Novotny became First Secretary of the Communist Party. Novotny was soon to become the symbol of the Stalinist and repressive model which controlled all the aspects of public life and against which the concept of "socialism with a human face" was directly targeted.
