The article focuses on the political development in Czechoslovakia in 1956. It takes note of a response of the local communist regime to the disclosure of a personality cult that took place on the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It analyses the connection of Czechoslovak communism with the legacy of Klement Gottwald and refers to internal limits of the development in a given year. It states that the year 1956 is not a landmark in the transition from totalitarianism to post-totalitarianism; this shift happed a few years later in the Czechoslovak case.