Overview
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, known from 1948 to 1960 as the Czechoslovak Republic or Fourth Czechoslovak Republic, was the Czechoslovak state from 1948 until 1989, when the country was under communist rule, and was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of interest.
Following the coup d'état of February 1948, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power with the support of the Soviet Union, the country was declared a socialist republic when the Ninth-of-May Constitution became effective. The traditional name (Czechoslovak Republic), along with several other state symbols, were changed on 11 July 1960 following the implementation of the 1960 Constitution of Czechoslovakia as a symbol of the "final victory of socialism" in the country.
In April 1990, shortly after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was renamed to the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic. On 27 June 1990, the National Government of Understanding established by Ladislav Adamec which replaced his own government and was established for the designation of the Czechoslovak Federal Government. It was established in 10 December 1989 and until 1990, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was in power of the government and held a large majority until the new elections in February 1990 when the Civic Forum claimed victory and led the government until its end. The government was replaced by the Government of National Sacrifice led by Marián Čalfa.
Name
The official name of the country was the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Conventional wisdom suggested that it would be known as simply the "Czechoslovak Republic"—its official name from 1920 to 1938 and from 1945 to 1960. However, Slovak politicians felt this diminished Slovakia's equal stature, and demanded that the country's name be spelled with a hyphen (i.e. "Czecho-Slovak Republic"), as it was spelled from Czechoslovak independence in 1918 until 1920, and again in 1938 and 1939. President Havel then changed his proposal to "Republic of Czecho-Slovakia"—a proposal that did not sit well with Czech politicians who saw reminders of the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which NaziGermany annexed a part of that territory. The name also means "Land of the Czechs and Slovaks" while Latinised from the country's original name"the Czechoslovak Nation"upon independence in 1918, from the Czech endonym Češivia its Polish orthography
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