In the aftermath of World War II, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) was in a favorable position. Its powerful influence on Czechoslovak politics since the 1920s, its clean wartime record and cooperation with non-Communist parties, its identification with the Soviet Union, one of the country's liberators, and its determination to become the country's leading political force without alarming the West (a strategy also followed by Communist parties in Italy and in France) dovetailed with popular opposition to Nazi rule, the longing for real change that followed it, and the new political realities of living within the Soviet orbit to produce a surge in membership from 40,000 in 1945 to 1.35 million in 1948.Grogin, p. 132. Moreover, the Soviets viewed the country as a strategic prize: it bordered West Germany and boasted uranium deposits around Jáchymov.Morton Kaplan, p. 83Lonsdale, p. 14
