Czechoslovakia

Profile Of A Socialist Republic At The Crossroads Of Europe

David W Paul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429716249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Czechoslovakia as a political entity did not come into being until 1918, but the lands comprising modern-day Czechoslovakia have a rich history reaching back many centuries. This text offers at look at the historical background, the geopolitics and Czechoslovakia's international position, it's government and politics, economy, education and cultur

1
Historical Backgrounds

Czechoslovakia as a political entity did not come into being until 1918, but the lands comprising modern-day Czechoslovakia have a rich history reaching back many centuries. The earliest records, such as they are, suggest that Celtic tribes inhabited much of the region sometime before the birth of Christ. It was from one of these tribes, the Bòii, that the westernmost territories received the name Bohemia. Around 8 B.C. Germanic groups (Teutons) moved into the region of the Boii and pushed steadily eastward into Moravia (named after the Morava River, which flows through the region) and the area now called Slovakia. It is uncertain exactly when the first Slavic tribes made their appearance, but it may have been as early as the first century A.D. Slavs and Teutons alike were overrun by the Avars in the sixth century. Eventually, the Avars themselves were overthrown and destined for oblivion as a race. In the west, they were defeated early in the seventh century by the most powerful of the Slavic groups in the region, the Czechs, who were able to subjugate other peoples in the area as well. Farther east, the Avars held onto their territories until a final defeat by the armies of Charlemagne (c. 796).

During the next half-century there arose a state centering in Moravia, at first a fiefdom of Charlemagne’s empire and later a united kingdom under the rule of a Slavic prince, Mojmir I (c. 818-c. 846). His successors, Rastislav and Svätopluk, expanded the domains of Moravia to include Bohemia, southern Poland, modern-day Slovakia, and western Hungary. This expanded kingdom became known as the Great Moravian Empire.

Although Svätopluk’s empire was a sizable domain in its time, many details of its approximately one-hundred-year existence are the subject of historical debate. For a long time, modern historians apparently confused the Moravian Empire with a city by the same name (Morava) located far to the south in Pannonia. Thus there is some doubt as to exactly how the empire related to other political units of the Middle Ages, when and under what circumstances Christianity was spread throughout the empire, and many similarly important questions.¹

In any event, following Svätopluk’s death in 894 the empire was weakened by disputes among the great ruler’s three sons and by the interference of the East Frankish king, Arnulf. In this condition, Moravia fell victim to new invaders, the Magyar (Hungarian) tribes, which conquered and destroyed the Moravian empire in 907 and secured Hungarian control over the eastern regions for the next one thousand years. The Kingdom of Hungary that was formally established by the crowning of the Magyar prince István (Stephen) at the beginning of the eleventh century incorporated much of the former Moravian territory, including all of modern-day Slovakia. The Slavic peoples of this territory, the ancestors of the modern Slovaks, were thereby separated politically from those of the western territories, the Czechs, for most of the time between the collapse of Moravia and the formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The name Moravia itself came to refer only to a relatively small region that had been located in the west-central part of Svätopluk’s domains.

The Rise and Fall of Bohemia

During the tenth century, this truncated Moravia came under the control of a rising power to the west, Bohemia, and from that time on the destinies of Bohemia and Moravia have been closely interwined. Under the rule of the Přemyslid Dynasty, Bohemia expanded and defended its territories against Germans to the west, Poles to the north, and Magyars to the east, finally consolidating its domains by the middle of the eleventh century within borders that remained mostly stable for the next three centuries. In 1335, the region known as Silesia, long disputed by Bohemia and Poland, joined the Bohemian crownlands, although the sixteen small Silesian principalities continued to be ruled by native princes of the Piast Dynasty. The status of Silesia thus became a sensitive issue in the relations between Bohemia and Poland at an early date.

The Kingdom of Bohemia developed in a climate of insecurity, surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors. As a counterweight against this insecurity, Bohemia became dependent on the Holy Roman Empire, and in 1212 Emperor Frederick II clarified the relationship by granting Bohemia an imperial charter. Buoyed by this new stability, the Přemyslid monarchs built Bohemia into a major economic and political power.

These early developments prefigured what would be an enduring pattern in Bohemia’s history, namely that of a perpetual encounter with neighboring rulers and peoples. In the course of time, this encounter would increasingly take the form of a confrontation between Czechs and Germans, though it must be emphasized that the nationalistic conflict implied by this did not emerge until the modern era. Indeed, the Přemyslid king Václav I (1230-53) welcomed and encouraged German colonists in his realm, thereby facilitating the close association of two ethnic communities that would clash bitterly 700 years later. In the meantime, however, the Přemyslids—as well as their dynastic successors the Luxemburgs—were justly unconcerned with ethnic questions, for their world of the late Middle Ages had not yet seen the rise of popular nationalism.²

Bohemia’s wealth and influence grew once again under the rule of the last Přemyslid king, Václav II (1278-1305), and continued during the reign of the Luxemburgs, who first ascended the throne in 1310. Rich silver mines, developed in towns such as Kutná Hora, formed the basis of a booming economy that propelled Bohemia into an era of prosperity and power. Upper and Lower Lusatia were added to the crownlands, enhancing the international prestige of the Bohemian monarchs. The high point of Bohemia’s glory was reached during the reign of Charles I of the Luxemburg Dynasty, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in 1355. Prague became the empire’s capital, and Charles saw to it that his city reflected the grandeur of his title. Architects, painters, and sculptors were imported from other lands to create monumental landmarks, a great many of which stand today. Charles founded the first university in central Europe, an institution that still bears his name in socialist Czechoslovakia. By the time of his death in 1378, Charles had established Prague as a major cultural and political center in the heart of Europe, ruling directly over a kingdom stabilized by charters and institutions shaped by the king himself and exercising authority over all the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. The legacy of Charles IV has been deservedly treasured by every subsequent generation of Czechs, many of whom have considered that era to be among the finest in their nation’s checkered history.

The crown of the empire left Prague upon Charles’s death and was not brought back until it was worn by the Habsburg ruler Rudolf II at the end of the sixteenth century. In the meantime, the Bohemian kingdom passed through a time of religious and political upheaval, civil war, dynastic conflicts, and the rise of a powerful aristocracy that assumed the prerogative of electing the monarch. This is not to say that Bohemia stagnated during the entire period; some considerable progress was achieved in the arts and letters, particularly under the rule of the mercurial Emperor Rudolf II, whose personal quirks included a fanatical devotion to the fine arts.

Hus and the Hussites

From the early years of the fifteenth century, questions of religion came to dominate the history of the Bohemian kingdom. To set the context in which this developed, let us backtrack briefly. Christianity had become established among the Slavs of this region centuries earlier; most conventional histories trace the origins of Christianity to the building of the first church in Nitra (A.D. 836) and the baptism of fourteen Czech noblemen in Regensburg in 845. There is some evidence that Christianity had first come as much as two centuries before that.³ The tenth-century ruler Václav (St. Wenceslas), Bohemia’s patron saint, was instrumental in spreading Christianity throughout the realm. A bishopric was established in Prague under the rule of Pfemysl Boleslav II (c. 973), and in the thirteenth century the right of investiture of bishops was granted to the Bohemian monarch. The Bishropric of Prague was elevated to an archbishopric in 1344, during the reign of John of Luxemburg. Then, under the rule of Charles IV, a movement for church reform began, picking up strength during the reign of Václav IV (Charles IV’s son and heir to the Bohemian throne). It was at the height of this reform movement that the great religious leader Jan Hus entered the scene.

Hus, the son of a peasant from south Bohemia, became dean of the philosophy faculty at Prague University in 1401, amid a conflict between Czech and foreign elements (primarily German) within the university. In the following year, Hus also began preaching in Prague’s Bethlehem Chapel, where it had become the custom to preach sermons in the Czech vernacular rather than the conventional Latin. Hus drew a great deal of inspiration from his fourteenth-century predecessor Jan Milic (d. 1374), who sought to purify the church and bring it closer to the people. Hus also came to be influenced by the writings of the English theologian John Wycliffe, who had attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation and fought for reforms in the organization of the church.

Hus’s religious teachings were hotly debated. He was strongly opposed by Archbishop Zbynëk and the foreign masters of the university, who represented a majority of the faculty. For political reasons, however, King Václav supported Hus for the moment; in 1409 the king changed the university statutes to give the Czechs a majority, causing most of the foreign masters to resign and Hus to be elected rector of the university. From this position Hus continued to develop his own theological critique. He publicly condemned the sale of indulgences, argued for the dispensation of both species (bread and wine) in the eucharist, and openly challenged the doctrine of papal infallibility. These activities brought him into conflict with Rome, and in 1414 Hus was summoned to appear before an ecclesiastical council in Constance to justify his position. He had been promised safe conduct to Constance, which lay in the domains of King Sigismund, a half-brother and bitter rival to Václav of Bohemia. In Constance, however, Hus was imprisoned, given a brief hearing, and condemned. Sigismund’s promise of safe conduct proved insincere, and on July 6, 1415, Jan Hus was burned at the stake.

The execution of Hus provoked a rebellion in Bohemia, for the reformer had attracted a powerful following among his native noblemen. Hussitism, as the movement now came to be called, spread and became militantly defiant. A crisis developed when Sigismund attempted to claim the Bohemian throne upon the death of Václav in 1419. There ensued a period of protracted conflict, the so-called Hussite Wars. At first the conflict was fought between the Czech Hussites and foreign armies dispatched by neighboring rulers supported by the pope. In time, the Hussites successfully held off their foreign enemies and then started to fight each other. Several sects grew up within the Hussite movement, such as the communal Táborites and the fanatical Adamites. These fratricidal conflicts did not destroy the overall power of the Hussites, however; under the leadership of several brilliant military commanders, including Prokop the Bald and the blind Jan Zizka, the Hussites overcame their differences; established their position firmly; won the right to practice their new religion in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; and even managed to spread their beliefs by means of missionary efforts in Hungarian-ruled Slovakia. Bohemia’s religious rights were legitimated by the Compacts of Prague, written up in 1433 and agreed to in 1436 by Sigismund, the enemy king who had in the meantime become Emperor of Rome. Although not accepted by the pope, the Compacts served as the legal foundation of Protestantism in Bohemia for nearly two centuries thereafter.

Hussitism was indeed a form of Protestantism, begun in reformist zeal against the practices of the Roman church a century before the Lutheran Reformation. The Hussites consolidated their theology around the moderate doctrine of Utraquism, justifying the dispensation of both bread and wine to the laity. Their church was headed by an archbishop independent of Rome. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the majority of the nobles had become Protestants, and in 1458 the estates of Bohemia elected the first Protestant king in Europe, Jiri (George) of Podëbrady. King Jiri ruled for only thirteen years, but during that time he made his own contribution to Czech and European history by being the first ruler to propose an international league among monarchs to maintain peace.

Amid these remarkable events, yet another important religious thinker emerged, Petr Chelcicky (1390-1460). Chelcicky founded a pacifístic group known as the Brethren, among whose contributions was the translation of the Bible into Czech in the sixteenth century. Later, during the Counter-Reformation, most of the Brethren fled their homeland, many of them migrating by way of Moravia and later Saxony; some came to America in the eighteenth century, where they established the Moravian Church.

The Hussites not only brought about the dominance of Protestantism in Bohemia but also reasserted the independence of the Bohemian estates. One might see the events of this era as precocious expressions of a kind of Czech nationalism, for the religious conflict and even the scholarly controversy at Prague University had pitted Czechs against foreigners. Moreover, the theological ferment that culminated in the works of Hus and Chelcicky represented a monumental national contribution to European intellectual history; Martin Luther later acknowledged that Hus’s teachings had influenced him greatly, and it is therefore no exaggeration to say that the Reformation really began in Bohemia.

The “Darkness”

Upon the death of the Hussite Kingjiri in 1471, the Bohemian estates turned to a Polish prince and elected him King Vladislav II. In 1490, he became King of Hungary as well, and from this time on the two kingdoms were drawn into close interaction. When Vladislav’s son and heir, Louis, died in 1526, both crowns were left vacant. The Hungarian crown was quickly claimed by the archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and after some maneuvering he managed also to ascend the throne of Bohemia. Ferdinand thus became the first of many subsequent members of the Habsburg family to rule over Bohemia. Ferdinand immediately came into conflict with the estates, and the history of Bohemia during the next hundred years was a chronicle of struggle between the monarch and the nobles. Continuing political and religious divisions among the nobles enabled Ferdinand, with the help of some legal chicanery, to reestablish the principle of hereditary succession. He thereby secured the crown for future generations of Habsburgs despite substantial misgivings in the estates.

These misgivings erupted into a confrontation during the reign of Ferdinand’s grandson Rudolf II (1576-1611). By this time the Reformation in Germany had engulfed Europe in a swirling tumult, spilling over into the Habsburg domains and threatening the stability of all the crownlands. Rudolf clumsily attempted to eliminate Protestantism in Hungary and lost the Hungarian crown to the rebel king Matthias. Matthias eventually succeeded in forcing Rudolf’s total abdication and in 1611 ascended the imperial throne. Matthias, however, was also a Catholic, and he proved to be no more tolerant of Bohemian Protestantism than his predecessor. A controversy over the rights of Protestants in Bohemia resulted in the so-called Defenestration of Prague (1618), in which two prominent members of the king’s governing council were thrown out of a window in Prague Castle. It did not matter that they landed in the moat and escaped with minor injuries, for the defenestration signaled the beginning of a revolt by the Bohemian estates—a revolt that began as a reassertion of the nobles’ religious and political rights, led to the temporary overthrow of Habsburg rule in Bohemia, triggered the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe, and brought about the tragic destruction of Bohemia as a sovereign state.

The Thirty Years’ War was an event of great complexity, escalating into a general European conflagration in which Protestant and Catholic forces fought each other more or less to a draw, finally ending in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The treaty settled many long-standing religious and political quarrels that had arisen out of the Reformation by establishing the prerogative of each sovereign to determine the religion of his land. Unfortunately for the Protestants of Bohemia, however, the treaty restored neither their religion nor their independence. Early in the war, Bohemia had succumbed to an invasion by the Habsburg forces and their Catholic allies. The decisive moment had come at the Battle of White Mountain, near Prague, in 1620: Bohemia’s army, under the leadership of the recently elected King Frederick of the Palatinate, was defeated and sent scurrying in disarray as Frederick (the “Winter King”) fled into exile. Though the general war widened into an all-European conflict, Bohemia’s war had ended early in ignominious defeat.

Ferdinand II, the Habsburg ruler who had succeeded Matthias, recaptured Bohemia for the Habsburgs and set about reclaiming the “kingdom of heretics” for Catholicism. Protestant noblemen were exterminated, their properties confiscated and given over to a new nobility called in from Catholic lands to settle in Bohemia. Jesuits were brought in to reconvert the population to Catholicism. In 1627, Ferdinand enacted a new constitution that abolished all the political rights of the Bohemian estates, established Catholicism as the sole religion, certified hereditary succession to the throne, and introduced German as the official language. Nominally, Bohemia (together with Moravia and Silesia) remained a separate kingdom, but in reality it became no more than a province of the sprawling Habsburg domains ruled from Vienna. The flower of Bohemian society went into exile—some 35,000 families, including all the leading cultural and intellectual figures such as the brilliant and world-renowned educator Jan Amos Komenskÿ (Comenius). With the downfall of the Bohemian kingdom, Czech culture went into eclipse and Czech society entered a long period of oppression sometimes referred to as the time of “darkness.”

This “darkness” was not entirely unmitigated; some positive development continued. The legacy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries includes, for example, a wealth of baroque art and architecture that can be seen throughout the Czech lands today. Although not the work of Czechs, some scholarship took place in the ancient university city. Among other creative personalities of this era, Mozart was attracted to Prague and found in it a congenial atmosphere for a temporary home. In the late eighteenth century, industry began to develop in Bohemia and Moravia as the great landlords turned some of their energies toward manufacturing. Yet the character of the period was nonetheless that of colonialism; an outside power ruled over the land through an aristocracy whose primary loyalty was to the imperial center rather than to the native masses who spoke a separate language and were excluded from power and privilege. There is therefore a great deal of validity to the mythic imagery of “darkness” popularly ascribed to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, notwithstan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Photographs
• Note on the Pronunciation of Czech and Slovak
• Map of Czechoslovakia
• 1 Historical Backgrounds
• 2 History, Geopolitics, and Czechoslovakia’s International Position
• 3 Government and Politics
• 4 The Economy
• 5 Czechoslovak Society
• 6 Culture and Education
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index