On February 21, 1948, tens of thousands of workers and students poured into Prague’s Old Town Square. By evening, popular militias and revolutionary “action committees” had begun to form all over Czechoslovakia, and the unions sent a delegation to President Edvard Beneš demanding that he respect the people’s will and appoint a new, thoroughly socialist government.

Two days later some 2.5 million workers went on strike (in a total population of around 11 million), and action committees occupied offices across the country. On February 25, demonstrators filled the enormous Wenceslas Square and threatened to march on Prague Castle, the seat of government, if the president refused to give in. By late afternoon Beneš accepted the revolutionaries’ proposal for a new government, and Communist leader Klement Gottwald returned to Wenceslas Square to announce victory to the cheering crowd.

Milan Kundera, in his 1969 novel Life Is Elsewhere, describes the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s 1948 seizure of power as a moment of mass euphoria. The first anniversary of what came to be known as “Victorious February” was celebrated with genuine jubilation. But already repression had begun, and it was only the beautiful ideals of the revolution that enabled some (like the novel’s poet protagonist) to overlook its increasingly ugly reality. Kundera himself, formerly a socialist realist poet, would dedicate the rest of his life to cynical prose.