history
Czech history is hugely complicated, fascinating, and essential to understanding the Czechs.
Three centuries of being shat on by bigger neighbours (and almost as frequently by their own leaders) has had a marked effect on the nation's psyche.
Of the last 300 years, they've been independent for just 35. It's all so complex, in fact, that Czechitout can give you only the briefest overview of the 20th century.
A marriage of convenience
Like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia was a marriage of convenience between a few bits of the Austro-Hungarian Empire left over at the end of World War I.
It was cobbled together in 1918 from two small nations, the Czechs and Slovaks, who spoke similar languages but had quite different histories (the only other time the Czechs and Slovaks had lived together in a single state was in the 10th century).
Tomas Masaryk,
first Czechoslovak president, parades down Wenceslas Square on
independence day, 28 October
1918 (from a contemporary postcard).
But the new country got off to a fine start. Czechoslovakia inherited 80% of Austro-Hungarian industry, it was Central Europe's only democracy, and the arts and culture flourished.
It was an amazingly diverse country too: a mix of Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Jews, Hungarians, Poles and loads of others, with no one group in the majority.
A 50 Crown
banknote of the 1930s, designed by Alfons Mucha, one of the great Art
Nouveau artists. Note the text is written in Slovak, Ukrainian, German
and Hungarian (the other side is Czech).
"Peace in our time"
But that diversity was the country's downfall. The depression hit the industrialised border regions hardest, areas populated mainly by ethnic Germans.
In the 1935 elections, about 90% of the Czechoslovak Germans voted for a proto-Nazi party that supported secession and joining up with Nazi Germany.
In Munich, 1938, at a meeting between the leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Germany (but to which Czechoslovakia was not invited), Hitler was given the green light to annex Czechoslovakia's border areas.
The British Prime Minister of the time, Neville Chamberlain, infamously returned to Britain waving the agreement and proclaiming "peace in our time". The deal was all right because Czechoslovakia was "a far-away country about which we know nothing."
During the war, Prague's Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe, was decimated.
The city, however, emerged almost unscathed, which explains its beauty today.
At another infamous conference, this time in Yalta in 1944, the Allies got together to carve Europe up into "spheres of influence" and Czechoslovakia ended up in the Soviet camp.
As a result, American troops had to wait idly at the border for two weeks until the Red Army reached Prague to do the liberating.
Unfortunately, the liberators forgot to go home until 45 years later.
From the frying pan into the fire
In the first post-war election, the communist party won 40% of the vote, making it the largest in parliament.
With just a little prodding from Stalin, they seized complete power in 1948 in a bloodless coup, and turned Czechoslovakia into one of the most orthodox communist states in Europe.
In early 1968 the reform-minded Dubcek became the communist party's first secretary. His intention was to create a friendlier, more open socialism, which he dubbed "socialism with a human face".
Censorship was abolished, and for one spring and part of the summer the arts and political debate flourished.
Unfortunately, Brezhnev was unimpressed, and on August 20 Soviet tanks rumbled across the border.
Only two
countries protested:
Romania, about the violation of the national sovereignty of a socialist
sister state;
The United States, about the Russian soldiers who were seen standing
on their tank's gun barrel in order to reach over the American embassy
wall and steal pears.
Soviet tanks
on Wenceslas Square, August 1968.
Normalisation
A new, more obedient government was installed, which began what it called "normalisation".
This involved returning the country to strict communism, making the 1970s perhaps the most depressing era of Czechoslovak history. Alcohol consumption doubled.
Then, in the late 1980s, a certain Mr Gorbachev said the invasion of Czechoslovakia had all been a horrible mistake.
In 1989, half the population of East Germany decided to take its winter holiday in the grounds of the West German embassy in Prague. The Berlin wall fell. And still the Czechoslovaks waited.
The Velvet Revolution
On November 17, 1989, Prague students took to the streets to commemorate, as they do every year, the arrest of thousands of students (and the killing of a few) by the Nazis in 1939.
Riot police took exception to the tone of the demonstration, and in the ensuing violence one student was (falsely) reported killed.
That was what was needed to get the passive populace out onto the streets, which they did until even huge Wenceslas Square proved too small for the million-strong crowds.
Crowds on
Wenceslas Square, November 1989
The government melted away with a speed and willingness that still feeds conspiracy theories, and inspired the foreign media to call it "the Velvet Revolution".
Ten days later, a playwright, philosopher, brewery worker and frequent political prisoner, Vaclav Havel, became president.
The divorce
From the outset, one of the most pressing issues for the new government was the relationship between the two halves of the federation.
Slovakia got back some of the autonomy it lost in 1968; a humble hyphen caused vehement disagreement (the one in Czecho-Slovakia), and finally the "hyphen war" was resolved by adopting the wordy title "the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic".
In the 1992 elections, the first which were not just the communists versus everyone else, the Czechs elected a right-wing party with a policy (ostensibly) of rapid economic reform.
The Slovaks chose an ex-communist boxer with a policy of plodding change and beating on the Hungarian minority.
Not surprisingly, the two republics were unable to agree even on a federal president. The country split on January 1, 1993, forming the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
top l home l about the author
A very messy history...
To illustrate just how complex history in the former Czechoslovakia is, let's take an old granny from a region known as Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia.
Our granny was born early this century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; went to primary school in Czechoslovakia; met her husband in Hungary; had children in the Slovak Nazi puppet state; grew old in the Soviet Union; and died in Ukraine.
Nothing remarkable about that, except she did all that without ever leaving the village where she was born.
History has taught Czechs to attach meaning to what they call "the years of eight". The main events in 20th century Czechoslovakia were:
1918
Czechoslovakia gains independence
1938 Nazi occupation
1948 Communist coup
1968 Soviet invasion
There were great expectations for 1988, but they didn't manage the Velvet Revolution until 1989.
Defenestration: a time-honoured Czech tradition
Defenestration, or throwing people out of windows, is another time-honoured tradition and one which has marked many of the great and terrible turning points in Czech history:
The First Defenestration (1419)
Angered by repression of their Hussite (Protestant) faith, a mob throws two Catholic councillors from the windows of Prague's New Town Hall onto the pikes of the crowd below.
Their action sparks the Hussite wars, which end in compromise in 1434.
The Second Defenestration (1618)
A group of Protestant noblemen, unhappy at the succession of a notoriously intolerant Catholic king, throw two Catholic governors (and their secretary) from the windows of Prague Castle.
This time they land in a manure heap and survive.
In the ensuing Thirty Years War (1618-1648), all Bohemia's nobility are executed or forced to flee, war and disease kill 70% of the population, and the Czech Lands fall under Austrian control for the next 300 years.
Which is perhaps why there were no more defenestrations until…
The Third Defenestration (1948)
Days
after the "Victorious February" coup in 1948, Jan Masaryk, the only remaining
non-communist minister, "falls" to his death from a bathroom window of
Prague's Foreign Ministry.