APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110010-2
Government and Politics
A. Introduction (C)
When on the night of 20 August 1968 the Soviet-led military invasion of Czechoslovakia terminated Prague's 8-month experiment with "socialism with a human face," it did more than forcibly reinstate Soviet dominance in the formulation of Czechoslovak national policies. It also once again turned the Czechoslovak people away from their sporadic flirtation with political idealism, and forced them to retreat into that blend of political apathy, passive resistance, and pragmatic materialism which historically has been the more common national characteristic. As a result, the forced return to orthodoxy that has been dubbed "normalization" by the Communist regime of Gustav Husak has brought about a degree of political stability and renewed Soviet trust in the loyalty of its Czechoslovak ally. Nevertheless, the legacy of the 1968 experiment and its strangulation by Moscow continues to plague the country, whose current rulers have had to concentrate attention on the material well-being of the people to elicit a degree of acceptance from them.
Since 1968, therefore, the political, social, cultural, and economic development of the country has reverted to a mold that has been historically more common than the brief periods of true self-determination. Indeed, the central theme of the histories of the Czech and Slovak peoples has been the struggle to maintain their cultural and national identities in the face of successive periods of domination by their neighbors. Victimized by geography and their relatively small numbers, the Czechs and Slovaks have repeatedly found themselves the pawns of European expansionist powers—in modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazi Germany, and, most recently, the U.S.S.R.
The geographic proximity that led to their political domination by other European kept the Czechs, and to a lesser degree the Slovaks, within the sphere of an essentially Western cultural and social development, an evolution consistent with the Greco-Roman roots of both societies. Prior to 1918, however, the Czechs and the Slovaks pursued their respective national identities largely independently of each other. This historic individuality inevitably troubled the unity of Czechoslovakia. While the Czechs were developing their cultural and social traditions during 300 years of Germanic rule, the neighboring Slovaks were being molded by feudal Hungarian overlordship and customs. By the 20th century the Czechs and Slovaks had developed disparate cultural attributes and political modalities that were to prove as influential as the shared ethnic and linguistic characteristics in shaping the Czechoslovak polity.
The independent First Republic of Czechoslovakia lasted only from 1918 to 1938, its existence being assured only as long as British and French support appeared certain. The country's fate was sealed, however, when the Western powers, unprepared to risk war, chose a policy of appeasement at the Munich Conference in September 1938 and agreed to the cession of the Czechoslovak Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. In March 1939 German troops occupied the remaining areas of Bohemia and Moravia, which became a protectorate of the Reich; Slovakia was established as a German-sponsored autonomous state. Extensive border areas in southern Slovakia were seized by Hungary, which also acquired the easternmost province of Czechoslovakia, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia (Carpatho-Ukraine). Poland annexed the city and surrounding area of Tesin (Cieszyn).
The restoration of an independent Czechoslovakia was an avowed objective of the World War II allied victors. The country, however, emerged from the war with four-fifths of its territory occupied by forces of the Soviet Union, the dominant military power in a Europe that was still without a security system. Despite the 1943 Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of mutual assistance which recognized the pre-Munich frontiers of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R. annexed Ruthenia in 1945. The territorial changes that have occurred in Czechoslovakia since 1938 are shown in Figure 1.
The lack of opposition to the ceding of Ruthenia, a section inhabited almost entirely by ethnic Ukrainians, perhaps reflects the failure of Czecho-
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110010-2
