History of Czechoslovakia

With the collapse of the Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, the independent country of Czechoslovakia[1] (Czech, Slovak: Československo) was formed as a result of the critical intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, among others.

The Czechs and Slovaks were not at the same level of economic and technological development, but the freedom and opportunity found in an independent Czechoslovakia enabled them to make strides toward overcoming these inequalities.

More than 90,000 Czech and Slovak volunteers formed the Czechoslovak Legions in Russia, France and Italy, where they fought against the Central Powers and later with White Russian forces against Bolshevik troops.

[citation needed] The new state was characterized by problems with its ethnic diversity, the separate histories of the Czech and Slovak peoples and their greatly differing religious, cultural, and social traditions.

The concept of the Czechoslovak nation was necessary in order to justify the establishment of Czechoslovakia before the world, otherwise the statistical majority of the Czechs as compared to Germans would be rather weak.

The rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1933, the German annexation (Anschluss) of Austria in 1938, the resulting revival of revisionism in Hungary, the agitation for autonomy in Slovakia and the appeasement policy of the Western powers of France and the United Kingdom left Czechoslovakia without effective allies.

Relying on the Convention for the Definition of Aggression, Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš[16] and the government-in-exile[17] later regarded 17 September 1938 as the beginning of the undeclared German-Czechoslovak war.

[18] Hitler extorted the cession of the Bohemian, Moravian and Czech Silesian borderlands via the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938 signed by Germany, Italy, France, and Britain.

After an ultimatum on 30 September (but without consulting with any other countries), Poland obtained the disputed the Trans-Olza region as a territorial cession shortly after the Munich Agreement, on 2 October.

[citation needed] The Czechs in the greatly weakened Czechoslovak Republic were forced to grant major concessions to the non-Czech residents in the country.

In late November 1938, the truncated state, renamed Czecho-Slovakia (the so-called Second Republic), was reconstituted in three autonomous units: the Czech lands (i.e. Bohemia and Moravia), Slovakia, and Ruthenia.

Beneš worked to bring Czechoslovak communist exiles in Britain into active cooperation with his government, offering far-reaching concessions, including nationalization of heavy industry and the creation of local people's committees at the war's end (which indeed occurred).

[26] The main brutality suffered in the lands of the pre-war Czechoslovakia came as an immediate result of the German occupation in the Protectorate, the widespread persecution of Jews, and, after the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, repression in Slovakia.

In spite of the oppressiveness of the government of the German Protectorate, Czechoslovakia did not suffer the degree of population loss that was witnessed during World War II in countries such as Poland and the Soviet Union, and it avoided systematic destruction of its infrastructure.

[citation needed] The Potsdam Agreement provided for the expulsion of Sudeten Germans to Germany under the supervision of the Allied Control Council.

Following Nazi Germany's surrender, some 2.9 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia[27] with Allied approval, their property and rights declared void by the Beneš decrees.

The popular enthusiasm evoked by the Soviet armies of liberation (which was decided by compromise of Allies and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference in 1944) benefited the KSČ.

He accepted the resignations of the dissident ministers and received a new cabinet list from Gottwald, thus completing the communist takeover under the cover of superficial legality.

On 10 March 1948, the moderate foreign minister of the government, Jan Masaryk, was found dead in suspicious circumstances that have still not been definitively proved to constitute either suicide or political assassination.

Czechoslovakia became a satellite state of the Soviet Union; it was a founding member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) in 1949 and of the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

In June 1953, thousands of workers in Plzeň went on strike to demonstrate against a currency reform that was considered a move to solidify Soviet socialism in Czechoslovakia.

[29] The demonstrations ended without significant bloodshed, disappointing American Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, who wished for a pretext to help the Czechoslovak people resist the Soviets.

[30] For more than a decade thereafter, the Czechoslovak communist political structure was characterized by the orthodoxy of the leadership of party chief Antonín Novotný, who became president in 1957 when Zápotocký died.

Large-scale arrests of Communists and socialists with an "international" background, i.e., those with a wartime connection with the West, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and Slovak "bourgeois nationalists," were followed by show trials.

The outcome of these trials, serving the communist propaganda, was often known in advance and the penalties were extremely heavy, such as in the case of Milada Horáková, who was sentenced to death together with Jan Buchal, Záviš Kalandra and Oldřich Pecl.

Radical elements found expression; anti-Soviet polemics appeared in the press; the Social Democrats began to form a separate party; and new unaffiliated political clubs were created.

The Czechoslovak Government declared that the Warsaw Pact troops had not been invited into the country and that their invasion was a violation of socialist principles, international law, and the UN Charter.

On 19 January 1969, the student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union.

Intentionally eschewing the label "party", a word given a negative connotation during the previous regime, Civic Forum quickly gained the support of millions of Czechs, as did its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence.

As anticipated, Civic Forum and Public Against Violence won landslide victories in their respective republics and gained a comfortable majority in the federal parliament.