|
1918–1938: A democratic republic. 1938–1939: After annexation of Sudetenland by Germany in 1938, the region gradually turned into a state with loosened connections among the Czech, Slovak, and Ruthenian parts. A large strip of southern Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine was annexed by Hungary, and the Zaolzie region was annexed by Poland. 1939–1945: The region split into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic. A government-in-exile continued to exist in London, supported by the United Kingdom, United States and its Allies; after the German invasion of Russia, it was also recognised by the USSR. Czechoslovakia adhered to the Declaration by United Nations and was a founding member of the United Nations. 1946–1948: The country was governed by a coalition government with communist ministers, including the prime minister and the minister of interior. Carpathian Ruthenia was ceded to the USSR. 1948–1989: The country became a communist state with a centrally planned economy. In 1960, the country officially became a socialist republic. 1969–1990: The federal republic consisted of the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic. 1990–1992: The federal democratic republic consisted of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Neighbours Austria 1918–1938, 1945–1992 Germany (Both predecessors, West Germany and East Germany, were neighbours between 1949 and 1990.) Hungary Poland Romania 1918–1938 Soviet Union 1945–1991 Ukraine 1991–1992 Topography The country was of generally irregular terrain. The western area was part of the north-central European uplands. The eastern region was composed of the northern reaches of the Carpathian Mountains and lands of the Danube River basin. Climate The weather was predominantly continental, but varied from the moderate temperature of Western Europe in the west, to the more severe weather of Eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union in the east. Official names See also: Hyphen War 1918–1920: Republic of Czechoslovakia (abbreviated RČS)/Czecho-Slovak State,[3] or Czecho-Slovakia/Czechoslovakia 1920–1938: Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR), or Czechoslovakia 1938–1939: Czecho-Slovak Republic, or Czecho-Slovakia 1945–1960: Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR), or Czechoslovakia 1960–1990: Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR), or Czechoslovakia April 1990: Czechoslovak Federative Republic (Czech version) and Czecho-Slovak Federative Republic (Slovak version) The country subsequently became the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, ČSFR, or Československo (Czech version) and Česko-Slovensko (Slovak version). History Main articles: History of Czechoslovakia, History of the Czech lands and History of Slovakia Foundation Origins Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, founder and first president Czechoslovak troops in Vladivostok (1918) Main article: Origins of Czechoslovakia The area was long a part of the Austro Hungarian Empire until the Empire collapsed at the end of World War I. The new state was founded by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk[4] (1850–1937), who served as its first president from 14 November 1918 to 14 December 1935. He was succeeded by his close ally, Edvard Beneš (1884–1948). The roots of Czech nationalism go back to the 19th century, when philologists and educators, influenced by Romanticism, promoted the Czech language and pride in the Czech people. Nationalism became a mass movement in the last half of the 19th century. Taking advantage of the opportunities for limited participation in political life available under the Austrian rule, Czech leaders such as historian František Palacký (1798–1876) founded many patriotic, self-help organizations which provided a chance for many of their compatriots to participate in communal life prior to independence. Palacký supported Austroslavism and worked for reorganized and federal Austrian Empire, which would protect Middle-European people against Russian and German threats. An advocate of democratic reform and Czech autonomy within Austria-Hungary, Masaryk was elected twice to Reichsrat (Austrian Parliament), the first time being from 1891 to 1893 in the Young Czech Party and again from 1907 to 1914 in the Czech Realist Party, which he founded in 1889 with Karel Kramář and Josef Kaizl. During World War I small numbers of Czechs, the Czechoslovak Legions, fought with the Allies in France and Italy, while large numbers deserted to Russia, in exchange for their support for the independence of Czechoslovakia from the Austrian Empire. With the outbreak of World War I, Masaryk began working for Czech independence in union with Slovakia. With Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik, Masaryk visited several Western countries and won support from influential publicists.[5] Bohemia and Moravia, under Austrian rule, were Czech-speaking industrial centres, while Slovakia, which was part of Hungary, was an undeveloped agrarian region. Conditions were much better for the development of a mass national movement in the Czech lands than in Slovakia. Nevertheless, the two regions united and created a new nation. Founding Czechoslovakia in 1928. Main article: History of Czechoslovakia (1918–1938) The Bohemian Kingdom officially ceased to exist in 1918 by transformation into Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was founded in October 1918, as one of the successor states of Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I and as part of the Treaty of St. Germain. It consisted of the present day territories of the Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. Its territory included some of the most industrialized regions of the former Austria-Hungary. Ethnicity The new country was a multi-ethnic state. The population consisted of Czechs (51%), Slovaks (16%), Germans (22%), Hungarians (5%) and Rusyns (4%).[6] Many of the Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians and Poles[7] and some Slovaks, felt oppressed because the political elite did not generally allow political autonomy for minority ethnic groups. This policy, combined with increasing Nazi propaganda especially in the industrialized German-speaking Sudetenland, led to unrest among the non-Czech population. The state proclaimed the official ideology that there are no Czechs and Slovaks, but only one nation of Czechoslovaks (see Czechoslovakism), to the disagreement of Slovaks and other ethnic groups. Once a unified Czechoslovakia was restored after World War II (after the country had been divided during the war), the conflict between the Czechs and the Slovaks surfaced again. The governments of Czechoslovakia and other eastern European nations deported ethnic Germans to the West, reducing the presence of minorities in the nation. Most of the Jews had been killed during the war by the Nazis and their allies. Ethnicities of Czechoslovakia in 1921[8] Czechoslovaks 8,759,701 64.37% Germans 3,123,305 22.95% Hungarians 744,621 5.47% Ruthenians 461,449 3.39% Jews 180,534 1.33% Poles 75,852 0.56% Others 23,139 0.17% Foreigners 238,784 1.75% Total population 13,607,385 Interwar The period between the two world wars saw the flowering of democracy in Czechoslovakia. Of all the new states established in central Europe after 1918, only Czechoslovakia preserved a democratic government until the war broke out.[citation needed] The persistence of democracy suggests that Czechoslovakia was better prepared to maintain democracy than were other countries in the region. Thus, despite regional disparities, its level of development was much higher than that of neighboring states.[citation needed] The population was generally literate, and contained fewer alienated groups. The influence of these conditions was augmented by the political values of Czechoslovakia's leaders and the policies they adopted. Under Masaryk, Czech and Slovak politicians promoted progressive social and economic conditions that served to defuse discontent. Foreign minister Beneš became the prime architect of the Czechoslovak-Romanian-Yugoslav alliance (the "Little Entente", 1921–38) directed against Hungarian attempts to reclaim lost areas. Beneš worked closely with France. Far more dangerous was the German element, which after 1933 became allied with the Nazis in Germany. The increasing feeling of inferiority among the Slovaks,[citation needed] who were hostile to the more numerous Czechs, weakened the country in the late 1930s. Many Slovaks supported an extreme nationalist movement and welcomed the puppet Slovak state set up under Hitler's control in 1939.[citation needed] After 1933, Czechoslovakia remained the only democracy in central and eastern Europe.[citation needed] Munich Agreement and German occupation Main article: German occupation of Czechoslovakia The car in which Reinhard Heydrich was killed In 1938, Adolf Hitler demanded control of the Sudetenland. Britain and France ceded control in the Appeasement at the Munich Conference, ignoring the military alliance Czechoslovakia had with France. In 1939, the remainder ("rump") of Czechoslovakia was invaded by Nazi Germany and divided into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the puppet Slovak State. Much of Slovakia and all of Subcarpathian Ruthenia were annexed by Hungary. Poland occupied Zaolzie, an area with Polish minority, in October 1938. The eventual goal of the German state under Nazi leadership was to eradicate Czech nationality through assimilation, deportation, and extermination of the Czech intelligentsia; the intellectual elites and middle class made up a considerable number of the 200,000 people who passed through concentration camps and the 250,000 who died during German occupation.[9] Under Generalplan Ost, it was assumed that around 50% Czechs would be fit for Germanization. The Czech intellectual elites were to be removed not only from Czech territories but from Europe completely. The authors of Generalplan Ost believed it would be best if they emigrated overseas, as even in Siberia they were considered a threat to German rule. Just like Jews, Poles, Serbs, and several other nations, Czechs were considered to be untermenschen by the Nazi state.[10] The deportation of Jews to concentration camps was organized under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, and the fortress town of Terezín was made into a ghetto way station for Jewish families. On 4 June 1942 Heydrich died after being wounded by an assassin in Operation Anthropoid. Heydrich's successor, Colonel General Kurt Daluege, ordered mass arrests and executions and the destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. In 1943 the German war effort was accelerated. Under the authority of Karl Hermann Frank, German minister of state for Bohemia and Moravia, some 350,000 Czech labourers were dispatched to the Reich. Within the protectorate, all non-war-related industry was prohibited. Most of the Czech population obeyed quiescently up until the final months preceding the end of the war, while thousands were involved in the resistance movement. For the Czechs of the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, German occupation was a period of brutal oppression. Czech losses resulting from political persecution and deaths in concentration camps totaled between 36,000 and 55,000. The Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia (118,000 according to the 1930 census) was virtually annihilated. Many Jews emigrated after 1939; more than 70,000 were killed; 8,000 survived at Terezín. Several thousand Jews managed to live in freedom or in hiding throughout the occupation. Despite the estimated 136,000 deaths at the hands of the Nazi regime, the population in the Reichsprotektorate saw a net increase during the war years of approximately 250,000 in line with an increased birth rate.[11] On 9 May 1945, Soviet Red Army troops entered Prague. Communist Czechoslovakia Spartakiad in 1960 Main article: History of Czechoslovakia (1948–1989) After World War II, pre-war Czechoslovakia was re-established, with the exception of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which was annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Beneš decrees were promulgated concerning ethnic Germans (see Potsdam Agreement) and ethnic Hungarians. Under the decrees, citizenship was abrogated for people of German and Hungarian ethnic origin, who had accepted German or Hungarian citizenship during the occupations. In 1948, this provision was cancelled for the Hungarians, but only partially for the Germans. The government then confiscated the property of the Germans and expelled about 90% of the ethnic German population, over 2 million people. Those who remained were collectively accused of supporting the Nazis after the Munich Agreement, as 97.32% of Sudeten Germans voted for the NSDAP in the December 1938 elections. Almost every decree explicitly stated that the sanctions did not apply to antifascists. Some 250,000 Germans, many married to Czechs, some antifascists, and also those required for the post-war reconstruction of the country, remained in Czechoslovakia. The Beneš Decrees still causes controversy among nationalist groups in the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Hungary.[12] Carpathian Ruthenia was occupied by (and in June 1945 formally ceded to) the Soviet Union. In the 1946 parliamentary election, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was the winner in the Czech lands, and the Democratic Party won in Slovakia. In February 1948 the Communists seized power. Although they would maintain the fiction of political pluralism through the existence of the National Front, except for a short period in the late 1960s (the Prague Spring) the country was characterized by the absence of liberal democracy. Since citizens lacked significant electoral methods of registering protest against government policies, periodically there were street protests that became violent. Such was the case in the town of Plzeň, where riots occurred in 1953, reflecting economic discontent. Police and army units put down the rebellion, and hundreds were injured but no one was killed. While its economy remained more advanced than those of its neighbours in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia grew increasingly economically weak relative to Western Europe. Czechoslovakia after 1969 In 1968, when the reformer Alexander Dubček was appointed to the key post of First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, there was a brief period of liberalization known as the Prague Spring. In response, after failing to persuade the Czechoslovak leaders to change course, five other Eastern Bloc members of the Warsaw Pact invaded. Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on the night of 20–21 August 1968.[13] The General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev viewed this intervention as vital to the preservation of the Soviet, socialist system and vowed to intervene in any state that sought to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism.[14] In the week after the invasion there was a spontaneous campaign of civil resistance against the occupation. This resistance involved a wide range of acts of non-cooperation and defiance: this was followed by a period in which the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, having been forced in Moscow to make concessions to the Soviet Union, gradually put the brakes on their earlier liberal policies.[15] In April 1969 Dubček was finally dismissed from the First Secretaryship of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Meanwhile, one plank of the reform programme had been carried out: in 1968-9, Czechoslovakia was turned into a federation of the Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic. The theory was that under the federation, social and economic inequities between the Czech and Slovak halves of the state would be largely eliminated. A number of ministries, such as education, now became two formally equal bodies in the two formally equal republics. However, the centralised political control by the Czechoslovak Communist Party severely limited the effects of federalisation. The 1970s saw the rise of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, represented among others by Václav Havel. The movement sought greater political participation and expression in the face of official disapproval, manifested in limitations on work activities, which went as far as a ban on professional employment, the refusal of higher education for the dissidents' children, police harassment and prison. After 1989 Main article: History of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) In 1989, the Velvet Revolution restored democracy. This occurred at around the same time as the fall of communism in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. Within three years communist rule was extirpated from Europe. Unlike Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the end of communism in this country did not automatically mean the end of the "communist" name:[clarification needed] the word "socialist" was removed from the name on 29 March 1990 and replaced by "federal". In 1992, because of growing nationalist tensions in the government, Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved by parliament. On 1 January 1993 it formally separated into two independent countries: the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Heads of state and government See also: Leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia List of Presidents of Czechoslovakia List of Prime Ministers of Czechoslovakia Foreign policy International agreements and membership In the 1930s, the nation formed a military alliance with France, which collapsed in the Munich Agreement of 1938. After World War II, active participant in Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), Warsaw Pact, United Nations and its specialized agencies; signatory of conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.[16] Administrative divisions Main article: Administrative divisions of Czechoslovakia 1918–1923: Different systems in former Austrian territory (Bohemia, Moravia, a small part of Silesia) compared to former Hungarian territory (Slovakia and Ruthenia): three lands (země) (also called district units (obvody)): Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, plus 21 counties (župy) in today's Slovakia and three counties in today's Ruthenia; both lands and counties were divided into districts (okresy). 1923–1927: As above, except that the Slovak and Ruthenian counties were replaced by six (grand) counties ((veľ)župy) in Slovakia and one (grand) county in Ruthenia, and the numbers and boundaries of the okresy were changed in those two territories. 1928–1938: Four lands (Czech: země, Slovak: krajiny): Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, divided into districts (okresy). Late 1938 – March 1939: As above, but Slovakia and Ruthenia gained the status of "autonomous lands". 1945–1948: As in 1928–1938, except that Ruthenia became part of the Soviet Union. 1949–1960: 19 regions (kraje) divided into 270 okresy. 1960–1992: 10 kraje, Prague, and (from 1970) Bratislava (capital of Slovakia); these were divided into 109–114 okresy; the kraje were abolished temporarily in Slovakia in 1969–1970 and for many purposes from 1991 in Czechoslovakia; in addition, the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic were established in 1969 (without the word Socialist from 1990). Population and ethnic groups Main article: Demographics of Czechoslovakia Politics Main articles: History of Czechoslovakia (1918–1938) and Politics of Communist Czechoslovakia After World War II, a political monopoly was held by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC). Gustáv Husák was elected first secretary of the KSC in 1969 (changed to general secretary in 1971) and president of Czechoslovakia in 1975. Other parties and organizations existed but functioned in subordinate roles to the KSC. All political parties, as well as numerous mass organizations, were grouped under umbrella of the National Front. Human rights activists and religious activists were severely repressed. Czechoslovakia (or Czecho-Slovakia;[1] Czech and Slovak: Československo, Česko-Slovensko)[2] was a sovereign state in Central Europe that existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until its peaceful dissolution into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993. From 1939 to 1945, following its forced division and partial incorporation into Nazi Germany, the state did not de facto exist but its government-in-exile continued to operate. On 29 June 1945, a treaty was signed between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, ceding Carpatho-Ukraine to the USSR. From 1948 to 1990 Czechoslovakia was part of the communist Warsaw Pact and had a command or planned economy. A period of political liberalization in 1968, known as the Prague Spring, was forcibly ended when several other Warsaw Pact countries invaded. In 1989, as communism was ending all over Europe, Czechoslovakians peacefully deposed their government in the Velvet Revolution; socialist price controls were removed after a period of preparation. A few years afterwards, in 1993 the country was separated into two sovereign states, again peacefully. |
About us|Jobs|Help|Disclaimer|Advertising services|Contact us|Sign in|Website map|Search|
GMT+8, 2015-9-11 20:39 , Processed in 0.152201 second(s), 16 queries .
