Word: masaryks
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...head of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia's Bratislava branch told them that the Russians had engineered his arrest in 1949, then drugged him to make him confess. The most explosive charge of all concerned the death of Czechoslovakia's last non-Communist leader, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose "suicide" was announced shortly after the Communists seized power in 1948. But was it suicide? Czech reporters found evidence to the contrary-including the fact that all telephone lines to Masaryk's residence had been cut just before his death...
Despite such long strivings, Czechoslovakia is, politically speaking, a young country that did not gain its independence until 50 years ago. Even then, it took World War I and two remarkable men to achieve that. They were Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a philosophy professor, and his colleague and ultimate successor, Eduard Bene?, who had been one of his students at Prague. When the war broke out, they slipped out of their homeland to work abroad for Czechoslovak freedom. A master of public persuasion, Masaryk traveled to the U.S. and argued the case for his country's freedom so well that President...
...German and Austro-Hungarian empires crumbled in defeat, Masaryk and Benes went home to put their concepts of freedom into practice. From the first, the Czechoslovaks proved that they could indeed govern themselves. During the turbulent 1920s and early 1930s, while democratic governments gave way to dictatorships in neighboring countries, the Czechoslovaks retained a parliamentary government, pursued moderate policies and enjoyed relative economic stability. Ethnically, however, the nation was a melange of peoples?the dominant Czechs, restive Slovaks and some 3,000,000 Germans who wanted to be united with the Reich...
...Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Germans in Czechoslovakia saw a redeemer who would bring them home. Hitler was delighted to oblige. He charged that the country's citizens of German origin were being mistreated and must have his protection. Benes, who by then had succeeded Masaryk as President, needed international support in order to stand up to Hitler...
...country's largest single party. Benes formed a coalition government with them. In 1947, when Benes wanted to accept the U.S. offer of Marshall Plan aid, Stalin said no. Next year, in a Soviet-aided coup, the Czechoslovak Communists seized total power. Czechoslovakia's Western-oriented Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the country's founder, was killed in a fall from a window in the Foreign Ministry. Many Czechoslovaks believed that it was murder, and saw in his death the demise of their own freedom...