Eduard Beneš's call to arms for anti-German action at home, following the completion of his treaty of alliance and friendship with Soviet Russia, led promptly to sprucing up the resistance. The broadcast caused "much excitement and enthusiasm among the Slovak people," and according to reports from home became "the sole topic of conversation in Slovakia." It was deemed a matter of "historic significance for [the] country and brought a still more consolidated cooperation among all political elements." The "call for revolt will be fulfilled," prophesied an informant, especially when the "Second Front is opened [and] the Russians approach our frontiers."1 Another, intelligence source, "a prominent Czechoslovak politician" who "enjoys authority and confidence in all walks of public life... and belongs to the inner circle... cooperating with Pres. Beneš," said unmistakably that "all the leaders of the underground movement in the Czech territories and in Slovakia have mutually unified their present activities and their political programme."2
The immediate fruit of the reaction was the formation during Christmas week of 1943 of the Slovak National Council, which naturally gained Beneš's prompt endorsement upon his return to London. The council represented a rudimentary coalition of the Slovak Communist Party, still semiautonomous from the Klement Gottwald organization in Moscow, and a group of Masaryk-Beneš adherents, comprising all partisan leaders hostile to the Josef Tiso regime, who ultimately banded together as the Democratic Party. This promising embryo of a future provincial government soon polarized, however, into left and moderate segments.