Conflicts over the State Monopoly of Education in Slovakia, 1945–1948: Catholics, Communists and Democrats

This article examines the complex relationship between Catholics, communists, and democrats in connection with the battle over the nationalisation of Slovakia's schools in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. While the Catholic Church defended parochial education, at times in ways that the state would not tolerate, the communists championed a state education monopoly, although with some tactical regard for Catholic sensibilities. The democrats used the education issue to curry favour with Catholics, a move that backfired when they were unable to deliver on the hopes that Catholics placed in their party. Jozef Straka was a staunch and aggressive opponent of parochial schools. As an official in the administration of post-war Slovakia, he was instrumental in carrying out the state's seizure of church-run schools and establishment of a state monopoly of education. Jozef Straka was a Roman Catholic priest. Laco Novomesky was a defender of religious education. As Slovakia's commissioner of education, he insisted that every student in Slovakia have access to catechism classes, taught by a clergyman from his or her denomination, in the public schools. Laco Novomesky was a leading communist. A close examination of immediate post-Second World War Slovakia will not only make it clear why we find such counter-intuitive positions but also enable us to look at one of the crucial issues of conflict education between two major ideological and institutional forces in twentieth-century Europe communism and Department of History, University of Washington, 315 Smith Box, 353560 Seattle, WA 98195-3560, USA; felak@u. washington.edu. I am grateful to the International Research and Exchanges Board for its financial support for this project. Contemporary European History, 17, 4 (2008), pp. 505-522 © 2008 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0960777308004682 Printed in the United Kingdom This content downloaded from 157.55.39.58 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 05:46:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 5o6 Contemporary European History Catholicism in a time and place that is especially propitious for considering such issues. At the end of the Second World War, Slovakia, independent since March 1939, rejoined the Czech lands to reconstitute the Czechoslovak Republic.1 A combination of factors made Slovakia an especially significant venue for examining the interaction between Catholics and communists. First, both Catholicism and communism enjoyed strong positions there. Slovakia was traditionally heavily Catholic, and the Catholic Church held a central place socially and culturally for many Slovaks.2 Moreover, Slovakia's leading political party during the inter-war period and dominant party during the war was explicitly Catholic and headed by a priest.3 The communists, while never as strong politically as Catholics, saw their stock rise due to their key role in the Slovak resistance and the successful defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Red Army, and emerged from the war as a powerful and rising movement. CommunistCatholic relations took on an importance in Slovakia that we find in few other places, becoming central to a host of issues, including land reform, the treatment of ethnic minorities, trials of alleged war criminals and anti-state conspirators, and, of course, education. Second, Czechoslovakia, including Slovakia, enjoyed a degree of political and cultural pluralism unmatched in east central Europe at this time, and was unique in the absence of any occupation armies since late 1945, when US and Soviet forces left the country. In other words, the fierce contest described below between an assertive communist-dominated bureaucracy and a self-confident church occurred before Czechoslovakia had become a communist state. As the war came to a close, the wartime Slovak Republic, in which the Catholic Church had a privileged role, collapsed along with its ally Nazi Germany, and a so-called people s democratic regime was set up in the reconstituted Czechoslovak Republic, a regime in which the Communist Party would play a vital role. Slovakia came out of the war with a considerable degree of political autonomy, possessing its own administrative and legislative organs and free to make policy in a number 1 In 1950, the Czechoslovakia!! population was approximately 12.3 million, with approximately 8.9 million in the Czech lands and 3.4 million in Slovakia; Slovakia's inhabitants made up 27.9 per cent of the population of Czechoslovakia overall: Milan Kucera and Zdenek Pavlik, 'Czech and Slovak Demography,' in Jiri Musil, ed., The End of Czechoslovakia (Budapest: Central European Univ. Press, 1995), 372 According to the 1930 census, 71.61 per cent of Slovakia's population identified themselves as adherents of the Roman Catholic confession, and an additional 6.42 per cent identified themselves as adhering to the Greek Catholic confession, for an overall proportion of 78.03 per cent for Catholics in Slovakia. In the 1950 census, the percentages were 76.20 per cent and 6.55 per cent respectively, for an overall proportion of 82.75 Per cent; for Protestants, the percentages for Lutherans were 12.02 per cent in 1930 and 12.88 per cent in 1950, while for Calvinists they were 4.38 per cent and 3.25 per cent respectively. Thus, in 1950, 98.88 per cent of Slovaks identified themselves as Catholic or Protestant Christians. Of course, this data includes not only practising believers but those who belong to a particular confession only nominally: Jan Pesek and Michal Barnovsky, Statua moc a cirkvi na Slovensku IQ48-IQ53 (Bratislava: Veda, 1997), 13. This was the Slovak Peoples Party, run by Father Andrej Hlinka from 19 19 to 1938, and Father Jozef Tiso thereafter. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.58 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 05:46:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Conflicts over the State Monopoly of Education in Slovakia, 1945-1948 507 of realms.4 The government's Kosice Programme, proclaimed in newly liberated territory in eastern Slovakia in April 1945, promised among other things that Slovaks would be 'masters in their Slovak land' and that their relations with Czechs would be as 'equal with equal'.5 Only two political parties were permitted in Slovakia at the start the Communist Party of Slovakia (Komunisticka strana Slovenska, KSS) and the Democratic Party (Demokraticka strana, DS). With the outlawing of Slovakia's leading interwar and dominant wartime party, the Slovak People's Party (Hlinkova slovenska l'udova strana, HSL'S), Slovakia's Catholics lost the option of voting for an avowedly Catholic party, and instead were forced to choose between the atheistic KSS and the Lutheran-dominated DS. The new regime sought to weaken the influence of the Catholic Church and clergy over life and politics in Slovakia. At the same time, however, both the KSS and the DS wanted support from the Catholic population and were to a greater or lesser degree reluctant to risk alienating that population through actions perceived as anti-Catholic. It was in this context that one of the most problematic issues of relations between the Church,6 the Communist Party, and the Democratic Party played itself out the establishment of a state monopoly of education.7 This article will briefly discuss the issue in the contexts of the interwar period, the wartime state, and the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, introducing the dilemmas facing the Church, the KSS and the DS after the war with respect to education policy, and examining some of the differences in conception between Catholics and communists that underlay much of the conflict. Then it will examine three developments central to the issue the initial conflicts between Church and regime over the nationalisation of education in spring and summer 1945; the so-called April Agreement, when the DS cut a deal with Catholics in advance of the parliamentary elections of May 1946; and the debates over the new school law in 1947. The article will conclude with an assessment of the Catholic, communist and DS positions in the conflict over educational policy in post-war Czechoslovakia up to the communist takeover of February 1948. 4 In fact, the new Czechoslovakia had an asymmetrical structure, as Slovaks were allowed to maintain institutions they had established during the wartime Slovak National Uprising, such as the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners, which served as the main legislative and executive organs of that uprising. Slovakia's autonomy would be gradually whittled away during the period 1945-8. D See Zpramenov nasich dejin (Bratislava: Slovenske pedagogicke nakladatel svto, 1974), 3 1 5 . All translations of quotations from untranslated sources are by the author. 6 The term 'Church' in the context of this article will refer to the Roman Catholic Church. 7 While many of the issues facing Czechoslovakia's new regime were decided or at least heavily influenced by the central government in Prague (e.g. land reform, the expulsion of unwanted ethnic minorities, economic reconstruction), education during this period was left to Slovakia's authorities to decide. An indication of the divergence between educational policy made in Slovakia from that of the Czech lands can be seen in the fact that parochial schools were forbidden in Slovakia from 1945, but legal in the Czech lands until the communist takeover in 1948. While ultimately education policy was to be instituted across the republic on the basis of a parliamentary law on education, such a law never got out of legislative committee before the communist takeover of the country in February 1948. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.58 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 05:46:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 5o8 Contemporary European History