By 1950, the Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe and Soviet control of its satellite states in Eastern Europe was nearing completion. In Czechoslovakia, Communist control of the Czech Parliament was won in the relatively free elections of 1946. Following Socialism’s historical playbook of never giving up power once taken, the Communists seized complete control of the country in a coup in 1948. Power was consolidated, and by 1949, only one institution stood in opposition to the Czech Communists: the Czechoslovak Catholic Church.

Czechoslovakian StB (state security) agents and troops, trained and controlled by the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB, predecessor of the infamous KGB, the Committee of State Security), closed down churches and schools, outlawed all religious printed materials, and arrested priest and laity. The Stb engineered show trials to discredit Czechoslovak Catholics and parade them as agents of the Vatican, the Americans, and the British. The most famous show trial was that of the Číhošť Miracle, where 19 parishioners swore that a cross on the main alter moved on its own. The StB brutally tortured the priest to confess that he mechanically linked the alter and pulpit, from where he could control the cross. The show trial failed when Father Josef Toufar died from the torture before testifying that he staged the miracle.

The Číhošť Miracle show trial inflamed Czechoslovak passions, particularly the only remnants of the Catholic Church left in the country: its monasteries and nunneries. The Czechoslovak religious orders had emerged from the state sponsored violence relatively unscathed. They were socially isolated and physically distant from population at large and initially deemed no threat to the state power. However after the death of Father Toufar, the Church was no longer “an opiate of the masses” but a potential source of insurgent political power.

On the night of 13 April, 1950, StB plainclothes agents and troops, “People’s Militia”, and their Soviet handlers launched Operation K (for kláštery, Czech for monastery) to eliminate the monastic system in the country. In one coordinated operation, 75 Czech and 62 Slovak monasteries, belonging to the Salesian, Jesuit, Redemptorist and Benedictine orders, were raided that night. 13 more monasteries were raided later in the week. The monks were loaded onto trucks and sent to concentration camps, if not outright shot. Most of the older monks were not seen again, while the younger ones were worked to death in slave labor battalions. Prominent abbots were found guilty of treason in public show trials. The buildings were looted and the land confiscated for state use. In the most notorious example, the oldest monastery in the country, the Břevnov Monastery in Prague was converted into the Interior Ministry’s Central State Archive. About 2500 monks were killed or imprisoned during Operation K.

Several months later the Communists launched Operation R against Czechoslovak Catholic nunneries. Little evidence (in English, that I can find anyway) exists regarding Operation R, other than it happened and the Catholic nunneries in Czechoslovakia ceased to exist afterwards. The lucky nuns were sent into exile to live in the village of Bílá Voda. The vast majority were never heard from again. One can only speculate as to the nuns’ fate, but the Soviet proclivity of sexual violence toward female “enemies of the state” during and after the Second World War probably provides a clue.