Revolutions in Prague

Abstract

Czechs and Slovaks seem fated historically to experience the great European and world conflicts in most acute form. For instance Munich, in 1938culmination of appeasement and prologue to war meant for the Czechs, with their vivid sense of history, a catastrophe comparable only to Bila Hora (the White Mountain), the battle of 1620 which subjected them to Habsburg rule for three centuries. What to the West is fast becoming an episode of no continuing significance, remains for most Czechs a symbolic warning of the fatal weakness of the Western world at a great historic turning point. Munich was for them more than a bankruptcy of foreign policy. Masaryk and Benes had constructed Czechoslovakia in 1919 in the image of the West. Munich was bound to bring in its train a profound re-orientation of the whole of Czech and Slovak life as well as a reshaping of foreign relations, once liberation from German thraldom was achieved. All Europe experienced similar transformations of a more or less revolutionary character. It is not surprising that the Czechs and Slovaks, located on the threshold of both East and West, should have been more subject than others to the shocks and strains of a world in the process of dynamic metamorphosis. It is not surprising that the end of the war in Europe dramatized in the new Czechoslovak historiography as the May Revolution should have ushered in a new era of Czechoslovak history, breaking sharply with pre-war and preMunich traditions. The rapid and deep-seated alterations in Czechoslovak life forecast by the Kosice programme of 1945, involving many violent wrenches with the past, were bound to create internal stresses and strains as well as international tensions. The events of February, 1948, viewed in this historical perspective and in the light of the world crisis between Soviet Russia and America, were but the climax of the continuing revolutionary transformation of Czechoslovakia since Munich and liberation.