It is now fashionable to reject everything that is “mainstream” outright, so that interpretations appear that the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was actually a change for the better or even a national salvation. But we don’t have to throw away rationality, morality or common sense just because we feel we are AGAINST it. There is no reason to gloss over the fact that the regime change in February 1948 was a national disaster. First and foremost, it was a disaster for the Czechoslovak Communists.
If the February coup had not happened, Czechoslovakia would still have been a socialist state, the Communist Party would have played a significant role in it, and it would have had very close relations with the Soviet Union. There was a clear national consensus on this. The merging of farms into larger enterprises would have taken place without the Communists, because economically nothing else made sense. Most industry had already been nationalised before 1948 anyway. No regime could have avoided the 1953 currency reform. Western European countries solved the same problem with a few years of high inflation, which is effectively the same thing.
In short, Czechoslovak socialism would have existed even without “victorious February”. It would have been liquidated in the 1980s. It just wouldn’t have been called the Velvet Revolution, it would have been called “cutting the fat”. It might even have been carried out by the same people.
The only thing that the February coup brought in addition was a wave of senseless irrational brutality that divided society and which is still invoked by all the scoundrels who are trying to plunder the remnants of the Czech lands. Within the Communist Party it brought up characters who should never have come to power. The regime remained marked by it to the end. And as much as the wave of terror was a humanly understandable reaction to the horrors of the 1930s, it did not bring anything positive.