The bibliography compiled for the purposes of this essay lists about 700 titles, all published within the last five years, and ranging from solid monographs to slender pamphlets. To these must be added the hundreds of articles contributed to scientific, cultural, and political journals. Clearly, in the present brief survey, only the truly fundamental problems of this abundant historiography can be examined. But first, a few remarks about what may be called the 'objective conditions' in which Czechoslovak historians are studying the twentieth century. To begin with the social climate: The Czechs and the Slovaks, the two nations that make up present-day Czechoslovakia, have always been small nations (combined, the country has 15 million inhabitants). Although a commonplace, it is well to remember that the Slovaks and the Czechs have not had long historical experience as an independent state: the Slovaks had no independent political existence for IOOO years (from the tenth century), and the Czechs for 300 years in the modern period (from the seventeenth century). This is probably the source of their 'history complex', and the explanation of the paramount position given to reflections on the past in a period when these entities were forming as modern nations. Not only in the nineteenth, but also in the twentieth century, historical reasoning was given pride of place in Czech politics and national ideology, as seen in the work of the founder of modern Czech politics, the historian Frantisek Palacky, or in the person of the most striking figure in Czech national life at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century Thomas Garrigue Masaryk. The preoccupation with history (providing historical justification for national and state existence), was given an even greater impetus by the birth of an independent state and the national exhilaration which accompanied