Category Archives: Czechia

by | 14 December 2024 · 2:27 pm

Rising Nationalist Communism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 619-621:

Romania asserted itself more boldly in the international sphere. From late 1958, its trade expanded with the West and contracted with the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Bloc’s equivalent to West Europe’s Common Market, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or COMECON), Romania opposed the plans of its allies to make it the agricultural base for their more developed economies. In the eyes of Romania’s leaders, such a scheme would have condemned the country to backwardness; yet it also aggravated long-festering inferiority complexes among them toward other, better established Communist parties, but also toward their own population. The Six-Year Plan that commenced in 1960 provided for sharp increases in Romania’s rate of industrialization, and Marxism-Leninism became a tool for Romanian national development. In 1963 Ceaușescu accompanied Foreign Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer on a trip to China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, meeting with Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Khrushchev.

Ceaușescu became the party leader after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 and built his popularity on defiance of Moscow. Neither legitimation through Marxian utopianism nor recourse to crude violence was enough to stabilize rule in an intensely anticommunist population, and Ceaușescu evolved into a nationalist extremist, whose personal power increased as did his personal identification with the nation. Romania was surrounded by hostile countries, Ceaușescu claimed, and he was the only force that could protect the people. A younger generation joined him in the Romanian Communist Party leadership, and together they promoted a collective identity based on cults of Romanian historical heroes as well as anti-Russian and anti-Semitic insinuations. They eschewed violent strategies of maintaining power. In the post-Stalinist period, these were not only inappropriate, they were no longer necessary. Earlier mass repression had smashed hostile social groups.

Marxism-Leninism tinged with nationalism thus permitted Romania’s Communists to develop a sense of their political legitimacy for the first time in their history, and also to make appeals to the population and tap “dormant social energies,” among workers and among intellectuals. While firming his grip on power, Ceaușescu permitted the publication of works of previously forbidden authors and fostered collusion with intellectuals that was not entirely new but was greatly intensified. The turn against the Soviet Union was a rupture with previous practice, however, and endeared Ceaușescu to the West. The French leader Charles De Gaulle visited Romania in May 1968, just as workers and students were testing his own regime. He found much to admire in a country that maintained independence against the superpowers and seemed so orderly. “For you such a regime is useful because it gets people moving and gets things done,” he told the Romanian dictator. In 1969, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Romania, and nine years later, Ceaușescu touched down in Washington, DC, as neither the first nor last repressive dictator to be accorded full state honors. What seems unusual in retrospect is that Jimmy Carter would celebrate Ceaușescu as a champion of human rights.

Such was the topsy-turvy world of East Central Europe after Stalin, where strategies of national legitimation brought Hungary toward economic reform but took Poland to the center of a very old and toxic nationalism, on a backdrop of slow economic disintegration. Bulgaria as well as Romania retained important facets of Stalinist control under strong party leaders and pervasive security apparatuses, yet one was inseparable in foreign policy from the Soviet Union, while the other treated Moscow almost as a hostile power. East Germany behind the Berlin Wall was modeling itself as Moscow’s most loyal student, but also building pride as the strongest economy in the East Bloc, pride that would evolve into a kind of minor nationalism, “socialist in the colors of the GDR,” black, red, and gold. In 1962 the Soviet Union would force Czechoslovakia to destalinize, and after that, this country also went on its own path, toward something called “socialism with a human face,” which, as it turned out, was initially a detour back to the 1930s, connecting with native traditions of democracy and Masaryk’s idea that truth will prevail.

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by | 8 December 2024 · 1:58 pm

Communist Takeover in Prague, 1948

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 535-538:

At the Cominform’s founding, [the Soviet leaders] urged the radical Yugoslav faction to publically humiliate French and Italian Communists for sharing government with imperialist forces, and Czechoslovak Communists understood they were implicated as well. At that time, they were sharing a coalition with Catholics, Czech National Socialists, and Social Democrats, and were gearing for parliamentary elections in 1948. On returning to Prague, Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský informed his Politburo that the time had come for a decisive act to place the country on a direct path to socialism. That implied a rupture with existing policy: the previous year, party leader Gottwald had still been speaking of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” without a dictatorship of the proletariat or violence on the Soviet model.

In February 1948, Czech and Slovak Communists used their huge cadre base and control of the military and police to stage a rapid seizure of power. Though backed by overwhelming force, the coup was bloodless. They took advantage of an embarrassing mistake by the National Socialist and Catholic politicians, who were tiring of the sundry illegalities of their Communist coalition partners. In November 1947, Communist authorities in Prague had staged a purge of the police force. Believing the population would support them, the Catholic and National Socialist ministers resigned in protest on February 21, thinking that the president would now dissolve the government and immediately call for elections. But they miscalculated: the Communists and their Social Democratic allies still had a majority of seats in the government, and simply replaced the ministers who had resigned with politicians of their own choosing. Then they summoned party cells across the country to form “action committees” that would purge every institution in public life.

The leaders got more than they bargained for. Within a few days, mostly young and impatient Communists had ousted directors and managers from newspapers, state administration, sporting clubs, political parties, schools, and cultural institutions such as theaters. Then they began firing people the next level down. The purge was so thorough that party chief Gottwald had to restrain students, who believed that they had advanced into a new stage of history. Charles University was expecting guests from across Europe to celebrate its six-hundredth anniversary, and the young radicals had just unseated the rector, causing several Western universities to withdraw their participation and spoiling the event’s propaganda value. Gottwald got on the phone to the student leader in charge and asked whether he and his comrades were thinking with their heads or “their behinds.” He did not object to the purges that students were carrying out in their own ranks. Opposition leaders were simply arrested, but the rest of the student body was required to appear before “verification commissions,” which expelled more than one-fifth of them. These “class enemies” were usually sent to do heavy labor, often in mines, and thus were erased from Czechoslovak cultural, economic, and political life.

A final stage now occurred in salami tactics. Having sliced off independent peasant, nationalist, and Catholic politicians, the Communists devoured their Social democratic partners whole. This was a regional trend. In the summer and fall of 1948, these more moderate Marxist parties were compelled to form “unity” parties with the Communists. The result in Hungary was the Hungarian Workers Party and in Poland the Polish United Workers Party. In East Germany, the Soviets had forced the merger of Communists and Social Democrats in April 1946, producing the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In all these cases, the joint cadre base of the new party was much larger than when the Communists stood alone; the challenge was now to subject Social Democrats to Leninist discipline. Czechoslovakia’s Communists dispensed with the pretense of a new name, however, and after absorbing the smaller Social Democratic party, they remained the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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by | 22 November 2024 · 3:36 pm

East Central Europe Under the Nazis

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 463-464:

By 1941, three zones of influence had emerged in Nazi-dominated East Central Europe. The first included areas where Germany destroyed states and left no native administration, itself taking rudimentary control. The second comprised areas where it destroyed states and replaced them with its own political entities, misleadingly called “independent states.” In the third zone, states remained under control of native political elites, but they came under irresistible pressure to become German allies. Only Poland belonged to the first category.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia fit between the first and second zones: it was occupied and destined for absorption into Germany but valued as a place that produced high-quality industrial goods. Its population was thought to be racially valuable (50 percent of the Czechs were considered assimilable; only 10 percent of the Poles) and was permitted its own heavily supervised government, with a Czech cabinet and ministries, and even a tiny armed force. Serbia was similar, a rump, embodying nothing a Serb nationalist could be proud of, with a Serb head of state who had been a Royal Yugoslav general but was under direct Nazi oversight. As we have seen, in contrast to Bohemia, a desperate underground struggle raged, extending from Serbia across Yugoslav territory, pitting German, Italian, and Croat forces against Serb nationalists and Communist internationalists.

The second zone was made up of the “independent” states of Slovakia and Croatia, called into life by Berlin with the expectation they would be loyal, co-fascist regimes; and they matched expectations, to say the least. Their ultranationalist leaders were eager to demonstrate—above all to themselves—their personal achievements for “the nation” by becoming even more racist than the state that had created them. In 1941, a Slovak newspaper boasted that the strictest racial laws in Europe were Slovak; at the same time, the brutality of the Ustasha anti-Serb actions shocked even the SS.

The final zone consisted of states that technically remained sovereign members of the international community, yet whose leaders could see from the fate of Yugoslavia and Poland the consequences of defiance. Still, unlike the puppets Croatia or Slovakia, the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian states did not owe their existence to Nazi Germany, and everything Germany wanted from them had to be negotiated. The lever for Germany in gaining compliance was territory: though less rapacious than Nazi leaders, East European elites also hungered for Lebensraum. Bulgaria hoped to recover ground lost at Neuilly-sur-Seine and wrench away disputed lands from Greece and Yugoslavia. Hungary wanted back everything it had lost at Trianon. Romania desired the return of lands it had lost in 1940, when parts of northern Transylvania went to Hungary in the second Vienna award (at the insistence of Hitler and Mussolini), and Bessarabia and Bukovina fell to the Soviet Union. These three states knew that Germany as the regional hegemon could make their aspirations become a reality.

Yet from 1941, German diplomats increasingly insisted that the governments of East Central Europe must fulfill a prime wish of their state. They should identify and segregate their Jewish populations, place them under racial laws, and deport them to German-controlled territories in Poland for a fate loosely described as “work in the east.”

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by | 9 November 2024 · 9:36 am

“Imperialist” Founding of Czechoslovakia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 346-347:

Basic agreements were made about Czechoslovakia during the war years, far away from the would-be country’s territory or population, by Czechs and Slovaks in exile, but also by Western statesmen. In 1915 representatives of Czechs and Slovaks in Cleveland agreed to form a common state, and in May 1918, Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians gathered in Pittsburgh and agreed on the formation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia. The agreement said that Slovakia would have its own administration, parliament, and courts, and some Slovaks believed that implied autonomy. In October 1918, Tomáš G. Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s existence from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and neither he nor his followers doubted that the state would be governed from Prague, just as France was governed from Paris.

Czech statesmen and their Slovak supporters were resolute on this point because they feared that anything short of unanimity might cost them support in Western capitals. They also worried about the dangerous examples that would be set by any talk of autonomy or regionalism. If Prague accorded the Slovaks self-rule, then demands for the same would pour in from Germans, Magyars, and Ruthenians. Slovakia itself was highly heterogeneous, with Magyars dominating cities and the southern edge, and three large German “islands” in the west, center, and northeast. Some Slovak politicians hoped there might be a chance at a later date to negotiate the details of local rule, but in the meantime, they had to act to counter demands from Hungary. A new ideology of Czechoslovakism (of one people in two tribes) papered over doubts, and the constitution of 1920 referred to “a Czechoslovak” language. In practice, that meant that Czech administrators in Slovakia felt free to use Czech, which Slovaks understood almost perfectly. Yet by doing so they began grating on local sensitivities, creating a sense of differences that had never before existed, because the two peoples did not know each other.

Yet there was also a practical side to this “Czech imperialism.” Because the Hungarian administration had stifled the development of Slovak elites for generations—in 1910, of 6,185 state officials at all levels in Slovakia, only 154 were Slovaks—educated and skilled Czechs were needed to build schools, create jobs, form the networks of cultural institutions, and simply run the state. For example, in the capital city of Bratislava (called Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German), as late as 1925 there were 420 Czechs to 281 Slovaks in the police directorate. But the Czechs also exported condescension. Slovaks were a small population, foreign minister Beneš said, “insufficient to create a national culture on their own.” Tomáš G. Masaryk, though his father was Slovak, insisted that

there is no Slovak nation. That is the invention of Magyar propaganda. The Czechs and Slovaks are brothers.… Only cultural level separates them—the Czechs are more developed than the Slovaks, for the Magyars held them in systematic unawareness. We are founding Slovak schools.

Uncomfortable facts were swept under the rug. Masaryk had attended the Pittsburgh agreement promising Slovaks some kind of autonomy, yet he failed to regard it as binding. And when the constitution was drafted, representatives of the German, Polish, Magyar, and Ruthene communities—one-third of the new state’s population—had no part in it. The Slovak delegates in the assembly were not elected but chosen by Vávro Šrobár, the Slovak chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, a physician active in Slovak politics who happened to know Masaryk. Šrobár and the Slovak delegates came from the Protestant minority, which was more enthusiastic about union with the Czechs than was the Slovak Catholic majority. They assented to a centralized state because the largely illiterate Slovak population was not “mature” enough for local autonomy and also because the threat of a return of Magyar power seemed to necessitate close cooperation with the Czechs.

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by | 23 October 2024 · 5:25 am

Protofascism in East Central Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 252-254:

Bohemia’s ethnic strife did not produce protofascism in Czech politics, and indeed, fascism would remain marginal in East Central Europe as a whole, emerging in strength in only German Bohemia, Hungary, and Romania. It flourished where national leaders, usually liberals, lost touch with the common people, thereby exposing themselves to accusations of treachery and contempt by forces further to the right. Like the Linz Program authors, these forces freely mixed socialism into their nationalism.

The liberal German leadership in Vienna, who “soft-pedalled their Germanism in the interest of a multi-national state,” had alienated Bohemia’s Germans by showing little concern for the nationality struggle in Bohemia. Usually of high bourgeois background, these liberals considered lower-class supporters of Schönerer and Wolf unripe for the political process. We hear echoes of their social elitism in the words President Paul von Hindenburg later found for Adolf Hitler: he was a “Bohemian corporal.” Hitler was not from Bohemia, but in Hindenburg’s mind, he fit the stereotype of a German ethnic of poorer quality. The 1882 Linz Program spoke for marginal people like Hitler and Wolf, in whom fears of national and social decline overlapped because they felt an urgent threat to a precarious status. They were being forced back down the social ladder before they had reached the first rung of respectability.

Yet the situation differed markedly among Bohemia’s Czechs. Their national leadership included few high bourgeois or large landholders, and the movement was about national as well as social upward mobility from the start, so that Czech politicians felt personally impugned when Germans said Czechs were a people of field hands and kitchen laborers. The directors of new institutions, political parties, scholarly organizations, and newspapers were one or two generations removed from small towns or the farm. Of the Czechs serving as deputies in the Austrian Parliament in 1900, 43.1 percent came from peasant and 36.5 percent from working-class backgrounds.

This upward mobility was the consequence of institutions that Czechs themselves had built, with some help from the Austrian state, to make the world around them one that seemed their own. By 1850 Czech-language schooling was close to universal, and the Czech movement built on it with secondary and higher education. In the late nineteenth century, the wealthy architect Josef Hlávka put up hospitals as well as administrative offices for the new elites. The movement’s ability to raise money for schools, hospitals, and museums reflected the wealth of a rising ethnic middle class, often pooled in Czech savings and loans associations.

The Czech middle classes rose in an economy that was already complex and well integrated with transregional commerce. Bohemia possessed one-third of the Habsburg monarchy’s industry, with mining and textile production that went back generations; the land’s agriculture was diversified and well capitalized, and featured very old productive sectors, like fish farming. As capitalism grew and Czechs became wealthier, the abundance of social and material goods dulled the edge of class conflict, opening paths to cooperation across the political parties that had emerged by World War I, including the Marxist one. When Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, Czech parties continued to cooperate across the political spectrum.

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by | 7 April 2024 · 5:57 am

Reactions to the 1926 Treaty of Berlin

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 397-400, 416:

Meanwhile, German foreign policy once again took centre stage. Stresemann had reacted to the delay in Germany’s admission to the League of Nations by taking a crucial step in improving relations with the Soviet Union. He wanted to keep friendship with the Soviet Union as a form of insurance policy, which might be used later to alter Germany’s eastern borders at the expense of Poland.

The pivot of German foreign policy towards the western Allies at Locarno had filled the Soviet government with feelings of deep anxiety. The delay in Germany joining the League offered the Soviets an ideal opportunity to make a dramatic diplomatic intervention. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Georgy Chicherin, told Stresemann that if the Locarno powers could not push through the entry of Germany to the League, then what could Germany expect of them when more serious matters were discussed? He felt a new Russo-German agreement would weaken the idea of the western Allies developing a common front against the Soviet Union. In response, Stresemann explained that he had always wanted to sign a new agreement with the Soviet Union, and had only delayed this due to a wish not to antagonise the members of the League of Nations during Germany’s application process.

On 24 April, the Treaty of Berlin (otherwise known as the German–Soviet Neutrality and Nonaggression Pact), was duly signed in Berlin by Gustav Stresemann for Germany and Nicolai Krestinski, the Soviet Ambassador, for the Soviet Union. It greatly strengthened the relationship between the two powers. The treaty consisted of just four brief articles: (1) The 1922 Treaty of Rapallo remained the basis of Russo-German relations, to which was added a promise by the two governments to maintain friendly relations with each other, and to promote a solution to all outstanding political and economic questions that concerned them both. (2) Germany and the Soviet Union pledged neutrality in the event of an attack on the other by a third party. (3) Neither party would join in any coalition for the purpose of an economic boycott on the other. (4) The duration of the treaty was set at five years. In 1931, it was renewed for three more years. To this, Stresemann added the additional assurance that if the League ever contemplated anti-Soviet sanctions or a military attack then he would do everything in his power to oppose it. The agreement was endorsed by a vote in the Reichstag on 10 June, with only three dissenting votes. On 29 June, the agreement was officially ratified by the German government. On 3 August, it was officially registered in the League of Nations.

In Germany, the Russo-German Treaty was received with universal acclaim. There was much greater public and political unanimity than there had ever been over the Dawes Plan, the Locarno Treaties and Germany’s proposed entry into the League of Nations. On 27 April, the Reichstag Committee on Foreign Affairs, usually the scene of bitter party disputes, gave the treaty its unanimous approval. The Nationalist DNVP believed the new agreement with the Soviet government would bring closer the return of Upper Silesia, Danzig and the Polish Corridor, for it was clear that a revision of Germany’s eastern frontiers required Soviet support, or at the least benevolent neutrality. Stresemann felt the agreement would quieten Soviet apprehension about the Locarno Treaties, maintain Germany’s good relations with Russia and appease the pro-Russian element on the Nationalist Right.

In the rest of Europe, the Treaty of Berlin caused a high degree of anxiety. The reaction in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania was wholly critical. The French press claimed the Treaty placed Germany’s entry into the League in jeopardy, and accused Stresemann of provocatively signing the German–Soviet Treaty to undermine the Geneva negotiations over Germany’s entry into the League of Nations. To the French government the treaty represented another Russo-German threat to Eastern Europe, and the French responded in June 1926 by signing an agreement with Romania, to add to its existing security agreements with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Aleksander Skrzyński, the Polish Foreign Minister, urged the Allies to examine what effect the new German–Soviet treaty would have on the obligations Germany would have to assume if it joined the League of Nations. In Britain, The Times adopted a surprisingly conciliatory tone, suggesting the agreement was not in conflict with the agreements made at Locarno, but the Daily Mail was much less charitable, arguing the Treaty of Berlin had raised suspicions about Germany’s true motives in moving closer to the Soviet Union at a time when it was supposedly aiming to become a loyal member of the League of Nations.

…

On 10 December, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the Peace Prize for 1926 jointly to the Foreign Ministers of Germany and France, Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand, for their ‘critical roles in bringing about the Locarno Treaty and Franco-German reconciliation’, while at the same time awarding the Peace Prize for 1925, retrospectively and jointly, to Austen Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary, for his role in the signing of the Locarno Treaties and to the American financier Charles Dawes, for the central part he had played in brokering the financial restricting of Germany’s reparations under the Dawes Plan.

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by | 6 April 2024 · 8:32 am

Turning Point at Locarno, 1925

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 377-379:

When the question of Germany’s entry to the League of Nations cropped up, Stresemann defended his government’s unwillingness to be bound by Article 16 of the Covenant. Germany, he said, could not pledge itself to support Poland in a war involving the Soviet Union. Briand tried to reassure him by saying that as Germany would be given a permanent seat on the League Council it could veto any proposal it disagreed with. A formula was finally worked out whereby each member of the League was obligated to cooperate against military aggression ‘to an extent which is compatible with its military situation, and which takes its geographical situation into account’. In return, Stresemann promised Germany would seek entry into the League of Nations as soon as possible.

Mussolini, the Italian Prime Minister, was initially lukewarm on the proposed Locarno agreements. He wanted a guarantee of the Brenner frontier between Italy and Austria to be added to the treaties, but Stresemann said this would only be possible if Germany was allowed to unite with Austria, something the Allies were not willing to accept. However, once it became clear the agreements would be signed, Mussolini turned up, on 14 October, wanting to share in the glory of joining Britain in guaranteeing the peace of Europe.

The ‘big day’ of the Conference took place in the town hall in Locarno on 16 October 1925. It witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee between Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy (the Locarno Pact). Under its terms, Germany recognised its western borders as fixed by the Treaty of Versailles, and the continuance of the Rhineland demilitarised zone in perpetuity. Stresemann emphasised the voluntary affirmation of Germany’s western borders was much more acceptable than the dictated terms of the Versailles Treaty. Germany, France and Belgium all agreed not to attack each other ever again, and Britain and Italy agreed to function as the joint guarantors of the agreement. All the parties agreed to settle disputes by peaceful means in future. The Locarno Treaties would only come into force when Germany was finally admitted to the League of Nations. The signatories further agreed to meet in London on 1 December for a formal signing ceremony.

Annexed to the main treaties were the German–Polish, German–Czechoslovak, German–Belgian, and French–German arbitration treaties, which promised all disputes which could not be settled amicably through normal diplomatic channels would be submitted to an Arbitration Panel or to the Permanent Court of International Justice. To add further insurance in Eastern Europe, France signed binding treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, pledging mutual assistance, in the event of conflict with Germany. Polish and Czech leaders signed these agreements in fear rather than hope. The agreements reaffirmed existing treaties of alliance concluded by France with Poland on 19 February 1921, and with Czechoslovakia on 25 January 1924. The British government refused to be a party to the arbitration treaties.

The Locarno Treaties were a key turning-point in the international relations of the 1920s. They were the effective diplomatic end of the Great War, and reconciled Germany and France in a way that had previously seemed impossible. Locarno was a much bigger triumph for the appeasement of Germany than Neville Chamberlain ever achieved, and how ironic that his half-brother Austen was one of its chief architects.

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by | 28 December 2023 · 5:24 pm

Budapest in 1919

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 253-256:

The country was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Republic of Soviets – an imitation of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime in Russia, with all its expropriations, nationalizations, regimentation and terror. Short and unprepossessing, [Bela] Kun had a squat face, almost no neck and a flaccid mouth. But he was a surprisingly gifted speaker and showed some remarkably practical common sense amid the ideological jargon. A torrent of decrees poured out from the Revolutionary Council, but they were patchily implemented, especially outside Budapest. Not all of them were stupid and Kun’s regime, mainly of passionate young revolutionaries – Kun was one of the oldest in the leadership at the age of thirty-three – were convinced they could out-Lenin Lenin.

The Kun regime’s first decree on 21 March 1919, day one of the Revolution, proclaimed martial law and imposed the death penalty for any acts of ‘subversion’, which meant any opposition to his committee of Soviets. The second day he replaced the existing judicial system with ‘Revolutionary tribunals’ along the lines of those that had operated in the French Revolution.

…

Red Terror began from the Commune’s first day, presided over by Tibor Szamuely, a sinister figure who modelled himself on Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Russian Soviets’ secret service, the Cheka. He introduced Red death squads – the most feared, active in many parts of Budapest, were the red-scarved and leather-jacketed Lenin Boys led by a sadistic twenty-three-year-old thug, József Czerny. It is estimated that at least 1,000 people were murdered in Budapest and the surrounding area in 133 days.

…

The Russian Bolsheviks gave the Hungarian Soviet plenty of vocal support and a modest sum of financial backing, but when it faced the prospect of losing power did nothing to intervene on behalf of world revolution or the cause of Communism close-ish to home – Hungary has a border with Ukraine, then still part of the Russian Empire. Romanian and Czech troops invaded Hungary in the summer of 1919 in their battle for independence and nationhood. Between them they controlled nearly half the country by the time the Kun regime collapsed and its leadership fled – most of them to Russia. The Romanians occupied Budapest from 4 August. Three nightmare months ‘of horror and misery as bad as the Soviet Commune followed…it was one of the darkest periods,’ one survivor of the invasion recalled. ‘The Romanians embarked on a systematic programme of looting, expropriation, deportations and terror.’

Children were taken from homes and sent into servitude in Romanian villages and towns. More than 500 Hungarians were murdered by Romanian troops and estimates suggest that 1,000 women were raped. Valuable art treasures, large amounts of agricultural produce and industrial plant were loaded on trains and sent east to Romania. They stole, among other things, 4,000 telephones from private homes they had ransacked. Bands of soldier-looters took railway locomotives and carriages, industrial machinery, and thousands of horses and cattle worth nearly 3 million gold crowns, more than twelve times in value than all the loans Hungary received four years later to get the country back on its feet. The Romanians took treasures from the National Museum, but were prevented from taking more by Brigadier General Harry Hill Bandholtz, the American member of the Allied Control Commission, which was supposed to supervise the Romanian army’s disengagement from Hungary.

Kun escaped in November 1919 and found refuge in Russia. As he left, without a hint of irony, he told a comrade: ‘the Hungarian proletariat betrayed us’ – by ‘us’ he meant the Communists. For a while he was treated as a hero in Soviet Russia, as one of the leading martyrs of the cause of world revolution. He was relatively successful in a series of roles in the Comintern in the 1920s and early 1930s. But Stalin loathed him. He disappeared into the great maw of the Gulag and was shot during the Great Purge in 1938.

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by | 10 September 2022 · 6:57 am

Slovak Resentments, 1934

From A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Journey Across Europe Book 1, NYRB Classics, 2011), Kindle pp. 295-296:

We had hardly said good-bye when a spectacled young man on a bike overtook me and dismounted, with a greeting in Slovak—‘Dobar den,’ I think, instead of ‘jo nápot kivánok’—and asked where I was going. He fell in step beside me [and we conversed in German]. He was a schoolmaster and he enlarged on the past sorrows of Slovakia. It is true that the local villages are Hungarian, but further north they are pure Slovak as far as the Polish border. They had been under the Magyars for a thousand years and always treated as an inferior race, and when any Slovak rose in the world he was promptly seduced into the lesser Magyar nobility—with the result that all local leadership evaporated. Slovak children used to be taken away from their parents and brought up as Magyars. Even when they were fighting the Austrians in defence of their nationality and language, the Hungarians were busy oppressing and Magyarizing their own Slovak subjects. The schoolmaster didn’t seem to like the Czechs much either, though this involved a different kind of resentment. The Czechs, it seems, regard the Slovaks as irredeemable bumpkins, while in Slovak eyes, the Czechs are bossy, petit bourgeois bureaucrats who take unfair advantage of their closeness to the government in Prague. The schoolmaster himself was from northern Slovakia, where—partly thanks to the Hussites, partly to the general spread of the Reformation in east Europe—much of the population is Protestant. I hadn’t realized this. It was touch and go in the Dark Ages whether the Slavs of the North became Catholic or Orthodox. Under the proselytizing influence of SS. Cyril and Methodius—the Byzantine missionaries who invented the Cyrillic script and translated the sacred writings into Old Slavonic—it could easily have been the latter. When I asked why it hadn’t, he laughed and said: “The damned Magyars came!” The link was severed, and the Czechs and Slovaks stuck to Rome and the West.

When he reached his turning he asked me to stay in his village, but I had to press on. He pedalled away with a wave. A nice man.

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by | 19 July 2021 · 6:18 am

Who All “Collaborated” with Nazism in Europe?

From Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, by R. M. Douglas (Yale U. Press, 2012), Kindle pp. 366-368:

The frequently reiterated assertion that the clearance of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary has in some way prevented the outbreak of World War III is a proposition so obviously false as hardly to deserve rebuttal. What made for peace in Europe was a lengthy occupation of Germany by both superpowers, which in itself offers a complete explanation of why, so long as it continued, no danger was to be apprehended from that quarter. The successful rehabilitation of the German political system, the inculcation of democratic habits and instincts among the people, and the binding together of postwar Germany within a larger European union are nearly as important factors in the transformation that has taken place in the character of European nationstate interactions since 1945. In these circumstances, the continuing presence of significant ethnic German minorities in Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Russia has not threatened the peace of the continent. There is no reason to suppose that if others had remained in their ancestral homelands a greater menace was to be apprehended.

Lastly, the suggestion that the ethnic Germans were, as presumed fifth columnists before the war or eager Nazi collaborators during it, especially if not uniquely deserving of punishment is no easier to sustain. As we have seen, a rule specifying a minority nationality’s unconditional duty of loyalty to a state to which it has been unwillingly attached that can be depended upon to vindicate the Czech or Slovak nation’s stance in 1918 [deserting in great numbers to fight for Russia rather than Austria-Hungary] and to condemn that of the Sudetendeutsche twenty years later is difficult to formulate. As for their wartime record, evidence is scanty that it was any worse than, or different from, that of the German people as a whole. Unquestionably that is quite bad enough, and I should not wish to be interpreted as contending otherwise. But even if all Germans, ethnic or Reich citizens, were equally guilty, not all Germans were equally severely punished. Why the Volksdeutsche, who if the worst that can be said about them is true came late to Nazism, should have been imprisoned, expropriated, and deported when the people of the country that originated Nazism and exported it abroad by the most brutal means suffered none of these things is hard to square with notions of strict and impartial justice.

More to the point, it conveniently elides the wartime record of the majority populations, which itself did not always bear close examination. Many Slovaks, for example, bore little less responsibility for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Conference than did the Sudeten Germans. For most of the Second World War, Slovakia was a German client state; Slovak troops took part in the invasion of Poland alongside their German allies in September 1939, and of the Soviet Union in June 1941. With only a single dissenting voice in the Slovak parliament, the great majority of the country’s Jewish population was expelled to German-controlled territory, from which only a comparative handful returned alive. Yet few Slovaks were punished after the war for these offenses, and none expelled. Besides, at a more mundane level the postwar meaning of “collaboration” was highly variable, with the same actions—or inactions—attracting either official toleration or condign penalties based on one’s ethnicity. During the Great War of 1914–18, J. R. Sanborn points out, some of the inhabitants of central and southeastern Europe “held affinities for one occupying force or another … but most people wisely tried to keep their heads down, to stay out of danger when they could, and, when all else failed, to run away. Nothing got you on the end of a rope faster than taking sides in a fluid war with an uncertain outcome.” In the Second World War also, this inglorious but time-tested formula for survival was the most popular strategy practiced by ethnic Germans, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and most other peoples who were given the opportunity to do so by their Nazi overlords, or, in eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, their scarcely less vicious Stalinist counterparts. (Tragically, it was an option denied to Jews, Sinti, and Roma.) For only the Germans, though, was it adjudged a “passive war crime” at the end of the conflict.

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