Word: masaryks
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...winter night in 1948, two weeks after the Communists had seized power in Czechoslovakia, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk fell to his death from his third-floor apartment in the Cernín Palace. Despite an official report that he had committed suicide, many Czechoslovaks believed he had been murdered by Soviet secret police. During Alexander Dubček's short-lived regime in 1968, a new inquest was ordered into Masaryk's death. Then came the Soviet invasion. Last week the new report was finally released, and it proved to be a tortured compromise between the Soviet position...
...report said Masaryk had a habit of sitting in cold places to cure his insomnia. He also had a way, it said, of sitting cross-legged in yoga fashion. The "remarkable connection" of these two habits, it concluded, probably led to his death in "an unfortunate accident...
...wrote Tomas G. Masaryk, founder and first President of the Czechoslovak Republic, who, as a young man, published a scholarly book on suicide. Last week his words seemed tragically prophetic. Hitherto Czechoslovakia's resistance to last summer's Soviet invasion had ranged from almost comic escapades in sabotage, to reasoned defense of its reform measures in the press, to mass demonstrations of anger and resentment. Almost never was there desperation to be seen, not even among the most militant fatigue-jacketed students of Prague's Charles University...
...least a score of Stalinist Party Boss Antonin Novotný's lieutenants took their own lives, usually by hanging, in the early days of Alexander Dubček's regime. Shortly after the Stalinist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Communists announced that Wartime Leader Jan Masaryk, son of Tomás, had jumped out of a window-a claim that seemed credible to many Czechoslovaks despite evidence that he was pushed. Many of Palach's mourners compared him to Jan Hus, the 15th century martyr who chose death at the stake rather than recant his religious...
...crime for Czechoslovaks to visit the grave of Thomas Masaryk, who founded their republic 50 years ago this week. But it is at least an act of courage. Last week, in advance of Czechoslovakia's anniversary celebrations, security agents at the graveside conspicuously photographed each pilgrim. Everywhere, Czechoslovaks are surrounded by a poised apparatus of repression. They are settling into a mood of resignation, withdrawing back into their private lives, abandoning politics once more to the politicians...