During the post-war period Czechoslovakia experienced a radical change in economic elites, which took place in three stages. The first phase commenced immediately after the end of World War II, when factory consels conducted a personal purge within their enterprises.
In 1948, the Communists triggered a second wave of purges mainly directed against members of other political parties or managers supposed to be opponents of the new regime. When the Communist Party started to search for "enemies" within their own ranks, the remainder of the country's economic elites familiar with the interwar period's market economy was eliminated during the show trials of the early 1950s.