A paper democracy carved from Austria-Hungary twice remade
Czechoslovakia sat in Central Europe between Austria, Hungary, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. Nationalists Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš steered 1918 independence as Habsburg rule collapsed; Munich, Nazi partition, then Cold War communism remade the map until the state itself finally split.
Czech national feeling grew out of nineteenth-century Romanticism, as scholars and teachers promoted the Czech language, and by the century's second half it had become a mass movement. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk pressed for democratic reform and Czech autonomy inside Austria-Hungary, sitting twice in the Vienna parliament, for the Young Czechs from 1891 to 1893 and for his own Realist Party from 1907 to 1914. During the First World War Czech and Slovak legions fought for the Allies in France and Italy, and many soldiers deserted to Russia, while Masaryk lobbied abroad for a joint Czech-Slovak state.
The republic was proclaimed in October 1918 as the Habsburg empire collapsed and confirmed by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, absorbing Bohemia, Moravia, part of Silesia and Slovakia. Masaryk served as president from November 1918 until December 1935, followed by his ally Edvard Benes. It was a patchwork: Czechs made up 51 percent of the population, Germans 22, Slovaks 16, Hungarians 5 and Rusyns 4, and many minorities resented being denied autonomy. The country covered nearly 128,000 square kilometres of largely hilly terrain, from the central European uplands in the west to the Carpathians and Danube basin in the east.
After the 1938 Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany took the Sudetenland, Hungary grabbed southern Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia, and Poland annexed the Trans-Olza area. In 1939 the remainder was split into a German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a separate Slovak state, while a government-in-exile operated from London.
The Red Army's advance in 1944 and 1945 restored the prewar borders, minus Carpathian Ruthenia, which went to Soviet Ukraine. A coalition with communist ministers governed until the party's coup in 1948, after which the country became a Soviet satellite with a command economy, renamed the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1960. The Velvet Revolution ended communist rule in late 1989, the state became the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and on 31 December 1992 it dissolved peacefully into two countries.
Source: Czechoslovakia
