During the three short years sandwiched between the Nazi defeat in 1945 and the Communist consolidation of power in 1948, Czechoslovak citizens enjoyed a range of democratic freedoms and political choices. What they did with those choices has become a subject of growing discussion among historians in recent years. Recent studies of liberated Czechoslovakia have taught us a great deal in particular about the Communist rise to power in the Bohemian Lands, the politics of postwar retribution, and the expulsion of Czechoslovakia's three million German-speaking citizens. In After Hitler, Before Stalin, James Ramon Felak contributes to our understanding of this important period by shifting our focus away from Prague and by highlighting the central role of religion in the battle for political supremacy in postwar Slovakia.

Postwar Slovakia, with its largely Catholic population, relatively democratic institutions, and a government heavily influenced by Communists, is, as Felak argues, “an ideal laboratory for examining Catholic-Communist relations” (xii). This thoroughly researched study offers a convincing account of how Communists outmaneuvered their political opponents in postwar Slovakia. It is also an important case study in the (sometimes surprising) relationships between Catholics and Communists. One of the most important conclusions is that the Slovak Communist party was not unabashedly hostile to Catholics. The party aggressively courted the Catholic vote, even as Communists simultaneously sought to weaken the Catholic Church institutionally by purging priests who had collaborated with the wartime Tiso regime, seizing control of Catholic institutions and land, and closing parochial schools. As Felak argues, the Slovak Communist Party attempted to make a fine distinction between the “the evil Populist collaborators” and the “basically decent Catholic common people, who were being misled” (85).

This contradictory effort was only marginally successful. Czechoslovakia is known to historians of Eastern Europe as the USSR's staunchest ally in the Eastern Bloc during the early Cold War. In the May 1946 elections, the Communist Party received a full 40 percent of the vote in the Bohemian Lands, and the Social Democrats received an additional 15.5 percent, a landslide for the Marxist parties. But the outcome was very different in Slovakia, where the Democratic Party received the support of 62 percent of the electorate, more than double the Communist share of the vote (30.37 percent). These election results reflected the successful efforts of the Democratic Party to woo Slovak Catholics, a partnership that was formalized with the 1946 April Agreement between Catholic leaders and the Democratic Party.

But as Felak demonstrates, in the aftermath of the April Agreement, the Democrats were unable to translate their electoral success into concrete political gains. Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest at the head of Slovakia's wartime satellite state, was tried and executed in spite of widespread support for clemency among Catholic Slovaks, and Catholic schools were closed. The Democratic Party was ultimately undermined by its very association with Slovak Catholics. “Of all of the difficulty in maneuvering, no one in postwar Slovakia had it worse than the Democrats,” Felak argues (203). The Communist Party successfully used the Democrats' association with Catholics to paint the party as a bastion of Fascist reaction and antistate conspiracy, inflict repressive security measures, and cast doubt on the party's right to exist. Thus, one conclusion that can be drawn from Felak's narrative is that the choices of Slovak Catholics did not matter much at all. They voted for the Democrats in large numbers, but the Democrats were in what Felak calls a “no-win” situation (86).

In Felak's account, the Communist rise to power in Slovakia is largely a function of the strategic maneuvers and countermaneuvers of leading political actors. It is a convincing story as far as it goes. But the book is also based on a view of politics as a sort of high-stakes chess game. We do not learn as much as we might about the political or religious ideals or experiences of ordinary Slovak voters and citizens who underpinned these brutal struggles for power. Reading this book sometimes feels like watching a play where much of the action takes place off-stage. Many of the political debates between Catholics, Democrats, and Communists in Slovakia between 1945 and 1948 were fundamentally about who did and believed what during World War II: who collaborated, who denounced and plundered their Jewish neighbors, how Slovak Catholics and Communists comported themselves during the war. Felak does not provide the background we need to judge the veracity of these claims and counterclaims adequately. As a result, readers may come away from this book with a somewhat distorted image of hapless, democratically minded Slovak Catholics as innocent victims of Communist savvy and subterfuge.

After Hitler, Before Stalin is methodologically speaking a very traditional history of political parties. It offers little reflection on how the realm of high politics was linked to broader forms of cultural, religious, or social change, or even to ideology or intellectual currents. It is nonetheless an important case study of a critical period of East European history. Felak offers a valuable perspective on how Slovak political parties jostled for power after World War II, the place of religion in this struggle, and the political foundations of the postwar Communist order.