of Statistics of the Polish Republic (Główny Urzad Statystyczny Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej), entitled during the 1920s Rocznik Statystyki and in the 1930s Mały Rocznik Statystyczny.
2. Joseph Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), chs. 4-8.
3. It would be possible, but awkward, to demonstrate the generalization statistically as the two censuses of 1921 and 1931 were not strictly comparable in this regard: the first registered all land by various size-categories, the second only agricultural land; the size-categories were also slightly altered from the one census to the other; finally, the second census was taken only in the middle, rather than at the close, of the interwar era. Cf. Mieczysław Mieszczankowski, Struktura Agrarna Polski Miȩdzywojennej (Warsaw: PWN, 1960), chs. 1, 2, and 10.
4. Cf. P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, “Agricultural Surplus Population in Eastern and South Eastern Europe,” summarized by N. Spulber, The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1957), p. 276, versus Wilbert E. Moore, Economic Demography of Eastern and Southern Europe (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), p. 64.
· Chapter Three ·
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
1
THE medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, the ancestral core of modern Czechoslovakia, had developed into a unified state at a time when not only Germany and Italy but even France and Spain were still disunited and internally fragmented. Geographical factors, which were both advantageous and disadvantageous, contributed to this early and perhaps premature development of an explicitly articulated Bohemian political entity. A string of mountains (the Sudeten, Giant, Ore, and Bohemian ranges) provided natural frontiers and at the same time landlocked the country. Ethnic geography, in turn, rendered Bohemia the westernmost Slavic salient amidst surrounding Germans.1 Reinforcing such geographical contributions to the formation of Bohemian statehood and Bohemian consciousness were certain historical experiences, of which the most enduring were the fifteenth-century Hussite Wars and their repercussions. As interpreted by subsequent generations of national intellectual leaders, these induced in the Czechs the self-image of a small but stubborn nation that taught all Europe the virtues of religious freedom, moral integrity, and social equality and was capable of martial valor but preferred leaders of intellectual and ethical, rather than of military or political, distinction. Be that as it may, the Hussite Wars also, alas, overstrained medieval Bohemia and isolated her within Europe, thus contributing to her eventual defeat and absorption into the empire of the Habsburgs. This process was completed with the exceedingly destructive Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48.
Map 3. Czechoslovakia
Within this Habsburg Empire, Bohemia occupied an anomalous position: it was economically the most valuable, but politically the most suspect of its rulers’ possessions. Precisely because its people were relatively recalcitrant and of dubious loyalty—they failed, for example, to resist the Prussian-French-Bavarian invasion of 1741—Bohemia’s economic exploitation by the dynasty could the more easily be justified. Yet, with the development of modern nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth century, the Habsburg regimes veered to the quite different, but still plausible, assumption that Czech nationalism—precisely because it was not affected by any “brother” states outside the imperial frontiers—was less dangerous to the empire’s integrity and security than, say, German, Italian, Romanian, or South Slav nationalism. Furthermore, Bohemia was central and vital, rather than peripheral and expendable, from the perspective of the imperial government, and the economic resources in the hands of its Czech population were second only to those of the Habsburgs’ German subjects by the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the central authorities in Vienna now intermittently found themselves taking a relatively tolerant view of Czech aspirations. For this they were denounced by their German subjects, particularly by the Sudeten Germans who lived along the interior rim of Bohemia and whose own nationalism had meanwhile grown to such a virulent racist intensity that its primary loyalty was more to the Pan-German Volk than to the Habsburg dynasty.2
During the half-century between the Ausgleich of 1867 and the eruption of World War I in 1914, the Austrian imperial government became something of an umpire between its German and Czech subjects, and the status of the latter was rather different from the supposed repression and deprivation that Masaryk and Beneš were later to allege to the West. Indeed, in the first part of the war, the Czechs did their duty, albeit with less fervor than their German fellow citizens. Also, as (unintended) schools of political and administrative preparation for subsequent independent statehood, the Vienna Reichsrat and the imperial civil service provided invaluable experience for the Czechs in the last decades before 1914.
The Bohemian nobility had been decimated and eventually destroyed during the two centuries of chronic foreign and domestic war between the burning of Jan Hus (1415) and the battle of White Mountain (1620). Czech nationalism and the Czechoslovak state were reborn in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the offspring of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, which, in turn, had emerged from the ever-resilient Czech peasantry in the process of Bohemia’s substantial industrialization. Thus, the modern Czech political style—in contrast, for example, to those of the Hungarian and Polish “gentry nations”—came to be characterized by bourgeois rather than by aristocratic traits: practicality and rationality, instead of audacity and romanticism. And the existence of a disciplined proletariat and an organized peasantry side by side with the experienced bourgeoisie made for a more balanced society and a more integrated polity than existed among these neighbors.
2
The territorial consolidation of Czechoslovakia and the delimitation of its frontiers, which included provinces and regions of disparate historical, cultural, and economic development, were the products of extremely intricate diplomatic maneuvers. Despite the vigorous development of their nationalism during the half-century before the outbreak of World War I, the Czechs by-and-large did not entertain the concept of a fully independent Czech state, let alone a Czechoslovak state, in 1914. Fearing that a disintegration of Austria-Hungary would only result in their own incorporation into a Greater Germany, the Czechs’ aspirations were initially directed toward a federalistic reform of the empire, entailing a substantial degree of autonomy for themselves. Hence their political activities within the Habsburg Empire had a different cutting edge than, say, those of the Piłeudskist Poles in the Russian Empire. Yet all this was to change precipitously during the World War; by its end the Czechs not only had an Allied commitment to an independent state of their own, but, through a combination of skillful diplomacy and luck, they had managed to emerge from the subsequent Paris Peace Conference with virtually all their serious territorial claims realized. Their state included not only the historic Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia intact, but also the Slovak and Ruthenian territories of historic Hungary, which had not been part of the old Bohemian kingdom, as well as the most valuable part of the Duchy of Těšín (Cieszyn, Teschen) Silesia. The duchy, though indeed formerly under the medieval Bohemian crown, was by the twentieth century predominantly Polish in ethnicity.
This was a remarkable achievement, and credit for it goes to a small, and initially scarcely representative, trio of Czech and Slovak exiles: T. G. Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, and Milan Štefánik. These men succeeded during the war in persuading the leaders of the Allied Powers that the replacement of Austria-Hungary by a series of independent national states was not only inevitable but also desirable from the Allied and general European perspectives. Only during the last year or two of the war did Czech public opinion at home, which was finally exasperated by deprivation, weariness, governmental chicaneries, and the growing suspicion that the war aims of the Central Powers were inimical to even the more moderate national aspirations of the Slavic peoples of East Central Europe, come to appreciate and to endorse the radical independence-oriented activities of Masaryk and his group
