Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the
Badeni Decrees
, which put Czech on an equal footing with German in all dealings with
the state, drove the country to the point of civil war, before being withdrawn by the cautious
Austrians.
World War I
At the outbreak of
WorldWarI
, the Czechs and Slovaks showed little enthusiasm for fight-
ing with their old enemies, the Austrians and Hungarians, against their Slav brothers, the
Russians and Serbs. As the war progressed, large numbers defected to form the
Czechoslov-
akLegion
,whichfoughtontheEasternFrontagainsttheAustrians.Masaryktravelledtothe
US to curry favour for a new Czechoslovak state, while his two deputies, the Czech Edvard
Beneš and the Slovak Milan Štefánik, did the same in Britain and France.
Meanwhile, the Legion, which by now numbered some 100,000 men, became embroiled in
the Russian revolutions of 1917, and, when the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany, found
itself cut off from the homeland. The uneasy cooperation between the Reds and the Legion
broke down when Trotsky demanded that they hand over their weapons before heading off
on their legendary
anabasis
, or march back home, via Vladivostok. The soldiers refused and
became further involved in the Civil War, for a while controlling large parts of Siberia and,
mostimportantly,theTrans-SiberianRailway,beforearrivingbacktoatumultuousreception
in the new republic.
Meanwhile, during the course of the summer of 1918, the Slovaks finally threw in their lot
withtheCzechs,andtheAlliesrecognizedMasaryk'sprovisionalCzechoslovakgovernment.
On October 28, 1918, as the Habsburg Empire began to collapse, the first
CzechoslovakRe-
public
wasdeclaredinPrague.Inresponse,theGerman-speakingborderregions(latertobe-
come known as the Sudetenland) declared themselves autonomous provinces of the new re-
public ofDeutsch-Österreich (German-Austria), which, it was hoped, would eventually unite
with Germany itself. The new Czechoslovak government was having none of it, but it took
the intervention of Czechoslovak troops before control of the border regions was wrested
from the secessionists.
Last tooptinfavourofthe newrepublic was
Ruthenia
(also knownasSub-Carpathian Rus
or Podkarpatská Rus, now the Zakarpattya province of Ukraine), a rural backwater of the
old Hungarian Kingdom that became officially part of Czechoslovakia by the Treaty of St
Germain in September 1919. Its incorporation was largely due to the campaigning efforts of
Ruthenian émigrés in the US. For the new republic the province was a strategic bonus, but
otherwise a huge drain on resources.
The First Republic
The new nation of Czechoslovakia began postwar life in an enviable economic position -
tenth in the world industrial league table
- having inherited seventy to eighty percent of
