Origins , founder and first president (1918) rally in Prague on Wenceslas Square, 28 October 1918 The area was part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire until it collapsed at the end of
World War I. The new state was founded by
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 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 second half of the 19th century. Taking advantage of the limited opportunities for participation in political life under Austrian rule, Czech leaders such as historian
František Palacký (1798–1876) founded various patriotic self-help organizations which provided a chance for many of their compatriots to participate in communal life before independence. Palacký supported
Austro-Slavism and worked for a reorganized federal
Austrian Empire, which would protect the Slavic speaking peoples of Central Europe against Russian and German threats. An advocate of democratic reform and Czech autonomy within Austria-Hungary, Masaryk was elected twice to the
Reichsrat (Austrian Parliament), from 1891 to 1893 for the
Young Czech Party, and from 1907 to 1914 for the
Czech Realist Party, which he had founded in 1889 with
Karel Kramář and
Josef Kaizl. During
World War I a number of Czechs and Slovaks, the
Czechoslovak Legions, fought with the
Allies in France and Italy, while large numbers deserted to Russia in exchange for its support for the independence of Czechoslovakia from the Austrian Empire. With the outbreak of World War I, Masaryk began working for Czech independence in a union with Slovakia. With Edvard Beneš and
Milan Rastislav Štefánik, Masaryk visited several Western countries and won support from influential publicists. The
Czechoslovak National Council was the main organization that advanced the claims for a Czechoslovak state.
First Czechoslovak Republic and
Milan Štefánik—both key figures in early Czechoslovakia
Formation The
Bohemian Kingdom ceased to exist in 1918 when it was incorporated into Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was founded in October 1918, as one of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of
World War I and as part of the
Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It consisted of the present-day territories of
Bohemia,
Moravia, parts of
Silesia making up present-day
Czech Republic,
Slovakia, and a region of present-day
Ukraine called
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, with Czechs and Slovaks as
constituent peoples. The population consisted of
Czechs (51%),
Germans (22%),
Slovaks (16%),
Hungarians (5%) and
Rusyns (4%). Many of the Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians and Poles and some Slovaks, felt oppressed because the political elite did not generally allow political autonomy for minority ethnic groups. This policy led to unrest among the non-Czech population, particularly in German-speaking
Sudetenland, which initially had proclaimed itself part of the
Republic of German-Austria in accordance with the
self-determination principle. The state proclaimed the official ideology that there were no separate Czech and Slovak nations, 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 Central European nations deported ethnic Germans, reducing the presence of minorities in the nation. Most of the Jews had been killed during the war by the Germans.
*Jews identified themselves as Germans or Hungarians (and Jews only by religion not ethnicity), the sum is, therefore, more than 100%. Interwar period During the period between the two world wars Czechoslovakia was a democratic state. 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
Tomas 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. Czech-Slovak relations came to be a central issue in Czechoslovak politics during the 1930s. The increasing feeling of inferiority among the Slovaks, who were hostile to the more numerous Czechs, weakened the country in the late 1930s. Slovakia became autonomous in the fall of 1938, and by mid-1939, Slovakia had become independent, with the
First Slovak Republic set up as a
satellite state of Nazi Germany and the far-right
Slovak People's Party in power. After 1933, Czechoslovakia remained the only democracy in central and eastern Europe.
Munich Agreement, the Second Republic, and the Two-Step German Occupation was fatally injured in 1942 (1938–1939) In September 1938,
Adolf Hitler demanded control of the
Sudetenland. On 29 September 1938, Britain and France ceded control in the
Appeasement at the
Munich Conference; France ignored the military alliance it had with Czechoslovakia. During October 1938,
Nazi Germany occupied the Sudetenland border region, effectively crippling Czechoslovak defences. The
First Vienna Award assigned a strip of southern Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia to Hungary. Poland
occupied Zaolzie, an area whose population was majority Polish, in October 1938. On 14 March 1939, the remainder ("rump") of Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the proclamation of the
Slovak State, the next day the rest of
Carpathian Ruthenia was occupied and annexed by Hungary, while the following day the German
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. 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. Under , it was assumed that around 50% of 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 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. In 1940, in a secret Nazi plan for the Germanization of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia it was declared that those considered to be of racially Mongoloid origin and the Czech intelligentsia were not to be Germanized. 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 laborers 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 populations of
Bohemia and
Moravia (118,000 according to the 1930 census) were 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 Protectorate saw a net increase during the war years of approximately 250,000 in line with an increased birth rate. On 6 May 1945, the third US Army of General Patton entered
Plzeň from the south west. On 9 May 1945, Soviet Red Army troops entered
Prague.
Third and Fourth Republics in 1960–1989 After World War II, pre-war Czechoslovakia was reestablished, with the exception of Sub
carpathian 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 had 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 cause controversy among nationalist groups in the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Hungary. Following the expulsion of the ethnic German population from Czechoslovakia, parts of the former
Sudetenland, especially around Krnov and the surrounding villages of the Jeseníky mountain region (
Nízký Jeseník and
Hrubý Jeseník) in northeastern Czechoslovakia, were settled in 1949 by Communist refugees from
Northern Greece who had left their homeland as a result of the
Greek Civil War. These
Greeks made up a large proportion of the town and region's population until the late 1980s/early 1990s. Although defined as "Greeks", the Greek Communist community of Krnov and the Jeseníky region actually consisted of an ethnically diverse population, including
Greek Macedonians,
Macedonians,
Vlachs,
Pontic Greeks and Turkish speaking
Urums or
Caucasus Greeks. '' in 1965
Carpathian Ruthenia (Podkarpatská Rus) 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 had no
liberal democracy. Since citizens lacked significant electoral methods of registering protest against government policies, periodically there were street protests that became violent. For example, there were riots in the town of
Plzeň in 1953 (31 May – 2 June 1953) reflecting economic discontent. Police and army units put down the rebellion. Hundreds were injured but no one was killed. While its economy remained more advanced than those of its neighbors in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia grew increasingly economically weak relative to Western Europe. The
currency reform of June 1953 caused dissatisfaction among the Czechoslovak citizens. To equalize the wage rate, Czechoslovaks had to turn in their old money for new at a decreased value. The banks also confiscated savings and bank deposits to control the amount of money in circulation. On 5 January 1968, the reformer
Alexander Dubček was appointed to the key post of First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. A brief period of liberalization known as the
Prague Spring began. On 3 August 1968, representatives of the Communist and Worker's parties of
Bulgaria,
Hungary,
East Germany,
Poland, the
USSR, and Czechoslovakia signed the
Bratislava Declaration. After that conference, the Soviet troops left Czechoslovak territory but came back 21 August 1968 and
invaded Czechoslovakia together with troops of Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary. Their tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on the night of 20–21 August 1968.
Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev viewed this intervention as vital for the preservation of the Soviet, socialist system and vowed to intervene in any state that sought to replace
Marxism-Leninism with
capitalism. In the week after the beginning of 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
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) leadership, having been forced in Moscow to make concessions to the Soviet Union, gradually put the brakes on their earlier liberal policies. Meanwhile, one plank of the reform program had been carried out: in 1968–69, 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 centralized political control by the CPC severely limited the effects of federalization. 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. In March 1985,
Mikhail Gorbachev became
President of the Soviet Union. Since 1986, he and his advisers promoted
Glasnost and
Perestroika. Later, they implemented the
Sinatra doctrine.
Milos Jakeš, a hardliner and communist leader (since 17 December 1987) of the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,
resigned on 24 November 1989 along with the CPC's entire Presidium.
After 1989 signing ceremony in February 1991 In 1989, the
Velvet Revolution restored democracy. This occurred around the same time as the fall of communism in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany and Poland. The word "socialist" was removed from the country's full name on 29 March 1990 and replaced by "federal".
Pope John Paul II made a
papal visit to Czechoslovakia on 21 April 1990, hailing it as a symbolic step of reviving Christianity in the newly-formed post-communist state.
Czechoslovakia participated in the Gulf War with a small force of 200 troops under the command of the U.S.-led coalition. In 1992, because of growing
nationalist tensions in the government, Czechoslovakia was
peacefully dissolved by parliament. On 31 December 1992, it formally separated into two independent countries, the
Czech Republic and the
Slovak Republic. == Government and politics ==